https://www.computingpioneers.com/api.php?action=feedcontributions&user=Maury&feedformat=atomComputing Pioneers - User contributions [en]2024-03-29T01:09:40ZUser contributionsMediaWiki 1.35.0https://www.computingpioneers.com/index.php?title=Bob_Bishop&diff=196Bob Bishop2021-10-20T19:05:30Z<p>Maury: hr for clarity</p>
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<div>This is a transcript of an audio interview. This transcript may contain errors - if you're using this material for research, etc. please verify with the original recorded interview.<br />
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Source: Juiced.GS Magazine at https://juiced.gs<br />
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Interview date: April 22, 2009<br />
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Interview audio: [[:File:Bob_Bishop.mp3]]<br />
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Interviewer: Mike Maginnis<br />
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Bob Bishop, along with Steve Wozniak, co-founded Apple Computer, Inc.'s R&D lab. Mr. Bishop wrote the first video games for the nascent Apple II computer, and went on to develop groundbreaking graphics routines that were utilized in such diverse places as CBS Television's popular Tic Tac Dough game show. He recently took time to talk with Juiced.GS writer Mike Maginnis about those heady days and to fill us in on what he's been up to lately.<br />
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Mike Maginnis: How were you first introduced to Apple and their computers?<br />
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Bob Bishop: I saw an ad in a magazine back around 1975 for the Apple-1 computer. They only made about a hundred of them or so, and I got interested in it, so I went up to Palo Alto and I knocked on Steve Jobs' door. He wasn't home at the time, but his mother and stepfather were there and they expected him back any minute, so they had me come in and sit down. About five minutes later, Steve came walking up and we got introduced, he took me out to the garage in the back and showed me the Apple-1. He had some trouble getting it to work—he had a keyboard and a monitor and he would type some stuff in but he couldn't quite remember how he was supposed to do stuff because Woz hadn't quite showed him everything. But I saw enough to be interested because I saw a lot of potential, so I ended up buying one—not from him, but from another computer store that was being started in Southern California. That's where I was living at the time, and one of my friends was starting up a new computer store with a couple of his associates. So I became their first customer and bought an Apple-1 from them.<br />
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Maginnis: What was it like to meet Steve Jobs way back then?<br />
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Bishop: He was about twenty years old. He was wearing sandals, had a scruffy little beard—I can't remember exactly, it was a long time ago.<br />
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Maginnis: What drew you to the Apple as opposed to the other hobbyist computers available back then, like the Altair and the IMSAI?<br />
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Bishop: Well, the other machines had a minor flaw: you had to put them together. You had to have a soldering iron and all kinds of stuff. Not that I was adverse to that, because I used to do soldering and stuff when I was at the University of Wisconsin. I worked in the physics department as an undergraduate, and I built amplifiers and things, but I just didn't feel like going through all that trouble to make a computer. I wanted one that was already put together, and the Apple-1 was the first one that came close. You wouldn't call it put together by today's standards, though; it was really just what you would call a motherboard today. You still had to get a power supply, case, keyboard, monitor, and all the other stuff, but it was still more put together than the Altairs and the IMSAIs of those days.<br />
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Maginnis: Do you still have your Apple-1?<br />
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Bishop: No, I traded it back to Apple to get my Apple II. When the Apple II came out, the Apple-1 was only $666, and the Apple II was around $1300. Back in those days, I couldn't afford that, so I went up to Apple and I met with Mike Marrkula and Steve Wozniak—this is when they were still in a two-office building. They weren't even in their main facility yet. I went up there and I explained my problem to them. Steve and Mike went off into the back room and they came out a few minutes later and said "Tell you what, we'll make you a deal. You give us back the Apple-1 and a certain amount of money, and we'll give you a brand new Apple II." That was a great deal because, heck, the Apple-1 was obsolete and the Apple II had all these neat capabilities. So of course I went for that. And it's a good thing I did, because if I hadn't, I probably wouldn't have gotten an Apple II at all, and I'd still be working out in the work-a-day world.<br />
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Maginnis: According to your Web site, you created the first four graphics games for the Apple II in about six months. That's a pretty amazing feat, especially considering how new the machines were at the time. Surely there weren't a whole lot of resources or documentation available. What kind of challenges did that present for you?<br />
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Bishop: Those were the fun days. I wish that could be the way it is today. I wish they made the iPhone with the same philosophy with which they made the Apple II. The Apple II was a completely self-contained computer: it had everything built in. You didn't have to go out and buy a software development kit and another computer to program it, like you do with the iPhone. Everything you needed was in the Apple II, so it was a fun thing to play around with. Plus it had a very limited amount of memory and limited capabilities; it wasn't too hard to experiment and find out how to make it do things. That's what I did. I got Apple II serial number 13, so I didn't have too many predecessors competing with me. One of the things I started playing with was hi-res graphics. There was absolutely zero documentation about hi-res graphics, so I played with it and found out what pixels turned on when I stored what hexadecimal numbers at what locations, and I was able to put together a map of the graphics screen, which was kind of bizarre. It wasn't linear; it was really screwed up, but I somehow figured it all out and I started working on a game. By the time the sun came up the next day, I'd made the very first game, which I called Rocket Pilot.<br />
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Maginnis: Did you have any previous programming experience?<br />
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Bishop: I'd been programming for quite a few years, but only on big mainframe computers, using high-level languages like FORTRAN. When the Apple II came out, I had to do everything in assembly language. I'd done some assembly language programming also on PDP-8 and PDP-11 computers, but the assembly language on the Apple II was a completely different animal, so I had to start over.<br />
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Maginnis: What kind of learning curve were you looking at? Was the Apple II something you just picked up easily, or did it take you a while?<br />
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Bishop: Originally, I programmed everything in machine language, which basically meant putting binary numbers into the computer. But since the computer had only 16K of memory, it didn't take a whole lot to fill up the memory in a hurry, especially if you're doing graphics, because the graphics screens used up about half the memory right there. The room that was left over for software was kind of minimal anyway, so you had to use it efficiently. You couldn't use a high-level language and really get anything done, because it would have used up too much of the resources. So most of the original stuff I did, I did in assembly language, which is one step above machine code.<br />
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Maginnis: So you skipped BASIC all together.<br />
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Bishop: Well, there was a BASIC that was available—there was Integer BASIC. The Apple-1 didn't really have any BASIC except the BASIC that you could buy as an option, because the original Apple-1 only had 4K of memory, and to run BASIC, you had to buy an additional 4K, for a total of 8K. That was barely enough to run Integer BASIC, which was the only BASIC available at that time. When the Apple II came out, they had Integer BASIC already in ROM and as the Apple II Plus came out, they had Applesoft BASIC, which supported graphics. But by then I'd already<br />
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devised all my own graphics routines.<br />
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Maginnis: It sounds like you really enjoyed pushing the envelope as much as you could.<br />
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Bishop: That was the whole fun! If there's no challenge, then why bother? Trying to find something that can't be done and doing it gives me more of a thrill than doing something that anybody can do.<br />
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Maginnis: You designed APPLE-TALKER and APPLE-LISTENER specifically to bring human speech generation and recognition capabilities to the Apple II. What was your motivation for doing so, and what obstacles did you encounter?<br />
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Bishop: Well, that opens up another whole topic: the cassette ports. The cassette ports were originally designed to store programs, so you could save and load programs that you or somebody else wrote. The only way you could load software into the computer was through a cassette tape. That was the original philosophy behind the cassette ports, but I experi-mented with them and found that they could do other things. They worked by detecting zero crossings of a sound wave. If you took a tape recorder, and you put in anything—not just a program, but music—you could play the music into the cassette port, and if you sampled the cassette port and toggled the built-in speaker in phase with what was being seen on the cassette port, you could actually hear the music coming through the speaker. And that, of course, worked for human speech as well. But instead of just merely reproducing it through the speaker, since it's a computer, you could store that information in memory and play it back later. So that was the birth of APPLE-TALKER. You could record your voice into the computer then play it back later through the built-in speaker.<br />
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Maginnis: Tic-Tac-Dough was a famous game show in the 1980s that used nine Apple II computers during production. What was your involvement with that?<br />
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Bishop: CBS Television contacted me because they needed someone who knew how to write computer programs for the Apple II. They had bought nine Apple II computers that were supposed to run the monitors for this new Tic-Tac-Dough game, and they had a master (non-Apple) computer that was going to send com-munication signals to each of the Apples to tell them what to display on the screens. They needed to put up a giant 'X', a giant 'O', a dragon, the names of the categories, whatever it is they wanted—somebody had to do that. And so they elected me! It was a fun little thing. I'd never done anything in television before, so it was my first chance to actually go behind the scenes and see what goes on in a TV station.<br />
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Maginnis: How long did you work on that show? <br />
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Bishop: It was kind of a one-shot deal that lasted a few months. There wasn't that much to do—it was just a matter of programming the computer to do what they wanted. But it was fun because, as you know, when you first write a program, it never quite works right the first time, and even when you think you've got it debugged, it doesn't quite work. I remember we were doing the prototype and the emcee, Wink Martindale, would say, "Now, we'll look at the categories," and nothing would happen. Who's to blame? Everybody's pointing the finger at somebody else. Usually, it turned out it wasn't my fault, though!<br />
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Maginnis: That's a relief! Another celebrity you got to meet was Steve Wozniak. How did that happen?<br />
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Bishop: I met Jobs long before I met Woz. I think I met Woz the first time when I went up to Apple to trade my Apple-1 in to get the Apple II. I may have met him before that, but I can't remember right now.<br />
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Maginnis: And how did Woz happen to invite you to join Apple’s R&D group?<br />
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Bishop: I'd been doing lots of stuff on the Apple, and of course I guess Apple knew about the stuff I was doing. In fact, I later found out from Jef Raskin, who was working at Apple at the time, that every time I'd send a new cassette tape up to Apple with one of my games, everybody would close down the entire engineering department and sit and play my game all afternoon! So, they knew about me but they never bothered contacting me. One day, I went up to the West Coast Computer Faire, up in San Francisco—I was living in the Los Angeles area at the time—and while I was there, Atari contacted me. They wanted me to come for an interview. I said okay, and I went up to talk with them. They showed me around the labs and everything. In fact, while I was walking through the lab, I noticed a cartridge sitting on one of the lab benches. It was labeled "APPLE-TALKER"! Anyway, they eventually made me a job offer, but I didn't want to leave NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where I was working and was happy, so I turned Atari down. About a week or two later, they came back and offered me more money. I thought, they must really want me badly, so I gave my <br />
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notice to JPL and accepted the Atari offer.<br />
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Three days later, I got a phone call from Apple. They said they wanted to talk to me. I said, "Well, I've already accepted a job offer from somebody else," and they said, "Yeah, we know all about it, but we want to talk to you anyway." So they flew me up, and that's when I talked with Woz and Mike Markkula, the president of the company, and Tom Whitney, the executive vice president. The four of us sat around all Saturday afternoon. They were answering anything I wanted to know. They held no secrets back; any question I asked, they gave me answers to. They wanted me to come work for them, so they topped Atari's offer. And that's how, after working there for a few years, I was able to retire.<br />
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Maginnis: What projects did Apple assign to you?<br />
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Bishop: I worked on several projects including the Apple III and demo programs. We had a show in New York where we had exhibits showing what the computer could do. One of the exhibits I worked on was using the Apple computer to generate an oscilloscope-type effect, using a special interface card that could digitize speech through a microphone and display it on the Apple II screen in real time as an oscilloscope display. It won a prize at the show for being one of the best exhibits, and we all got taken out to dinner. That was one of the things I worked on, but for the most part, I was free to work on just about anything I wanted to. In fact, Steve Jobs would occasionally stop me in the hallway and say, "Hi! How are things going, are you happy here?" And I'd say, "Yeah, it's okay." And he'd say, "Good!" and he'd walk on. He didn't care what I did, as long as I didn't go to the competition.<br />
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Maginnis: How long were you actually with Apple?<br />
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Bishop: I had a three-year stock option. That was the incentive for going there, because I had a sizable percentage of the company. Not real great, but enough to be able to retire on. After two years went by, Apple started getting wise and said, "Hey, wait a minute. When we gave this guy the stock option, Apple was like 19 cents a share. Now it's up in the twenty dollar range. We could save ourselves a lot of money if we get rid of this guy." So they had the infamous "Black Wednesday", when Mike Scott went around and fired forty of us, including the executive vice president Tom Whitney and me. To make it look legitimate, they included secretaries and janitors and everybody, just so it didn't look obvious. But their main motive was to get rid of the stockholders who had too much stock. So I <br />
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was there about two years.<br />
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Maginnis: That must have been an unpleasant way to leave the company.<br />
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Bishop: Yeah, but the very next day, Gene Carter, the vice president of sales, called me and asked if I would come work for his department. And I said, "Oh good! I get to keep my stock option then!" And he said, "Nope, sorry." So, there was no doubt they got rid of me just to save the stock. It's not that they wanted to get rid of me, because they immediately wanted me back.<br />
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Maginnis: What was it like to watch the evolution of the Apple, all the way back from the Apple-1 through the IIGS, considering how large a part you played in Apple's early years?<br />
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Bishop: When the company first started out, it was one building on Bandley in Cupertino, and shortly afterward, they opened up a second building, Bandley 2. They moved the engineering group to Bandley 2, and Bandley 1 was left to do administrative things and manufacturing and so on. In fact, when I was there, Steve Wozniak and I were the entire R&D group for the entire company. They had only about a hundred or so employees, so Steve and I constituted the entire R&D group. It was amusing—a few years ago, I went back down to Apple, and I saw they have a whole building dedicated to Apple R&D now! Steve and I have been replaced by a whole building.<br />
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Maginnis: It looks like you continued to use the Apple II family all the way through the Apple IIGS. <br />
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Bishop: Yeah, I worked on the IIGS. I never got a IIc, but I've done things on the IIc. I stayed with the Apple II and then into the III slightly. In fact, I was there when the Apple III was being designed, which was frustrating because they kept changing the design. I was trying to write software, and they changed the design so my software wouldn't work; I’d redo the software, and they'd change it again. Fortunately, the Apple III never really caught on anyway, so it never went anywhere. It was about that time the Apple Macintosh group was starting to design their new Macintosh computer.<br />
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Maginnis: Were you involved with the Macintosh development at all?<br />
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Bishop: I refused to get involved. It wasn't my kind of computer. See, the Macintosh computer was like the iPhone of today, except it didn't have any of the whiz-bang features. The original Macintosh was a black and white machine, compared to the Apple II, which had color. The Apple II had six colors, at least. The Macintosh was black and white. The Apple II, you could program; the Macintosh, you couldn't program. It had no built-in programming capabilities. You had to buy all the software from the company. It was totally, totally the antithesis of what I wanted to work on. I don't want to work on a computer if I can't program it—and the Macintosh was not user-programmable. So I never got involved in the Macintosh and I never have since.<br />
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Maginnis: What are you doing these days?<br />
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Bishop: Well, I've done a lot of Internet games. You may have heard of Internet riddles, online riddles. I did the very first one of those. I created a game about six years ago called Cybertrek. It was an online adventure game where you had to solve puzzles to get from one Web page to the other, and that idea has since caught on. Probably the most famous riddle wasn't one I developed, but that came after mine. It was a game called "This Is Not Pr0n", and that's what's always cited as an example of an online riddle. But it came after mine. I've done about fifteen or so online riddle games. I've created a new programming language called SIMPLE, which is based on the original Apple philosophy of having an easy to use programming language. I've been teaching SIMPLE at several of the schools in the area. I've written books, magazine articles, I've been a science and technology radio talk-show host.<br />
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Maginnis: As Mr. Logic, right?<br />
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Bishop: Yeah. That's what I use in my games, too. I write my games under the name of Mr. Logic.<br />
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Maginnis: Are you still actively doing the show?<br />
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Bishop: No. I did that for about ten years when I lived in Santa Cruz, but I occasionally still go on—I've been on several times since I moved here to Paradise. Now, I'm kinda sloughing off a little bit. I'm not as active as I used to be in doing all this computer stuff. I figure, there's a life to live, I might as well live it while I'm still alive.<br />
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Maginnis: Sure. So, if you had to sum up Bob Bishop in one statement, what would it be?<br />
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Bishop: Heh, I give up! What would it be? I don't know, that's a tough one. I'd have to think about that!<br />
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Visit Bob Bishop's homepage at<br />
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http://bob-bishop.awardspace.com/</div>Mauryhttps://www.computingpioneers.com/index.php?title=JD_Casten&diff=195JD Casten2021-10-20T00:12:46Z<p>Maury: HR for clarity</p>
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<div>Source: ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast<br />
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Source URL: http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-episode-9-the-atari-8-bit-podcast-jd-casten-steve-wilds<br />
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Interviewer: Kevin Savetz of ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast (www.AtariPodcast.com)<br />
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If you read Antic magazine (and typed in games from Antic magazine) you’re probably familiar with JD Casten’s games. JD Casten was a prolific author of games that appeared in Antic. Here’s the list: Risky Rescue, Escape From Epsilon, Advent X-5, Biffdrop, Box-In, Rebound, and Maximillian B.. Antic also published the Casten Game Disk (for purchase) which included new versions of some games -- Risky Rescue Industrial Version and Biffdrop Nightmare version -- plus two other games: Nemesis and Crazy Harold’s Adroit Adventure. He also wrote Easy-80, an 80-column driver, and the unpublished Banzai Font Designer. You can download them all from his website, www.jdcasten.info<br />
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In 1984, Antic wrote a short feature about JD, calling him their “star game designer”. They wrote at the time: What makes JD. “Casten's games outstanding is their fast movement, smooth graphics and humorous plot backgrounds. … Casten's advice to starting programmers is to keep practicing and tinkering. "If you want to do it, you will," he says. "The information's there, you just have to use it."”<br />
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JD also wrote several other Atari games that were never published -- and he has graciously shared them with us for the first time. We’ll talk more about those in the interview.<br />
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Also also: JD dug through his archives to find and scan a ton of material for the games that were published in Antic. For instance: for “Risky Rescue” (his first published game) he shared his magazine submission and acceptance letters. For “Escape from Epsilon” (his second game in Antic): the complete map levels, screen-graphic component study, and graphic data notes. For his text adventure, “Advent X-5”, his third published game (and first byline on the cover): the original map (never before published) + map locations key + objects & descriptions list + commands list. Also: scans of letters to and from Antic magazine, beautifully-presented code and screenshots -- all impeccably organized. Plus, there’s a file containing all of his unpublished programs -- Empire, Lunar Lander, Castles, Maze 5x5x5, Space Barrier, Pac-er, and The Lost Ring. ATRs and PDFs! It’s an astounding collection of Atari goodness that JD has made available for the first time. Available here: https://archive.org/details/JDCastenPapers<br />
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JD was happy to be interviewed, but said that he was only comfortable doing the interview by email. JD struggles with mental health issues - Chronic Paranoid Schizophrenia - and said that a live, vocal interview isn't an option due to what he calls the '24/7 conference call in his head.' He told me: “It’s more a matter of “logistics” than “comfort”—writing draws my thinking to my hands, while talking could easily be derailed and stilted by interruptions of my concentration by the voices I hear in my head.”<br />
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'''Are you comfortable with me mentioning your mental health on the podcast?''' <br />
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It’s alright to include references to my disability; I think it can be important to realize that people with schizophrenia can also function in a sane way, somehow, sometimes. There are many flavors of schizophrenia — mine, chronic paranoid schizophrenia, includes hearing voices, believing delusions, and paranoia (usually about symbolism—an over-abundance of meaning); but I luckily have the ability to keep one foot in “reality” enough to realize what other people would see as delusional, and I usually keep quiet about what my sometimes hostile, sometimes friendly voices are constantly talking to me about. The experience is like having a “radiohead” where people can hear your thoughts, and talk to you in your head, like a sort of telepathy that includes the tactile. Have no doubt though -- much suffering is involved, and I am disabled—which is a major reason I couldn’t get back into game design anytime in the near future.<br />
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'''Are you still in Oregon? (I live in Portland.)'''<br />
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Yes, I’ve lived in Eugene, Oregon since my sophomore year at WilLAMette High School in 1983. I’ve also lived in Florence, Vida, Portland (Aloha actually), Newport, and Bend; and also lived in Los Angeles, Syracuse in New York, and the Bronx. Eugene has a nice balance of nearby nature and cultural events— but I’d like to get out more, and check up on “Portlandia.”<br />
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'''Tell me how you got started with the Atari. Was it your first computer? What drew you to programming?'''<br />
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The first computers I saw were Radio Shack TRS-80s, the Sinclair ZX80, and the Apple II.<br />
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Before getting my Atari 400 along with the first couple of issues of Antic in the summer of 1982, I largely learned to program in BASIC on a Sinclair ZX80, which I purchased in the summer of 1981 via an ad in Scientific American (I saw the ad while I was researching how to solve the Rubik’s Cube with a screwdriver). I bought the ZX80 with my own money in 1981 (it was about $200)<br />
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My first computer exposure, however, was with a Radio Shack TRS-80 computer at my elementary school, in the sixth grade (circa 1979) at Newport, Oregon, where I played an addictive Hammurabi-like game called, Santa Paravia. (I later emulated this on the Atari with a game called “Empire”). I remember that my very first program, on a TRS-80 in early 1981, was something like: 10 PRINT “HELLO” followed by 20 GOTO 10.<br />
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My mom and an uncle picked out an Atari 400 in 1982 to pay me for some extensive babysitting I’d done the prior summer. I hadn’t heard of the Atari 400 at that time. A close friend in Bend (fellow Antic published game designer Jamie Sutherland) got a Commodore Vic-20 around the same time— and although the Apple II, Atari 400/800, and Vic 20 all used the 6502 CPU, I thought the Atari computers had an edge with their ANTIC/GTIA graphics chips.<br />
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My first experience with computers was playing games; and when I got my first computers, I could not afford to buy any games— so I simply programmed them myself. I found that I enjoyed programming more than playing the games, which might have been an extension of having liked creative toys like building blocks, Lincoln Logs, Tinker-Toys, Legos, Erector Sets, etc. throughout my youth. I was always self-taught (working through example programs in magazines, and reading the included programming manuals), but my approach was not to appropriate code, but to find my own way of doing things through trial and error. Certain habits, like using I, J and K as variables in FOR-NEXT loops were incorporated unconsciously in my programming from looking at the magazine programs; it wasn’t until learning about summations in college Calculus that I found these using these specific variable letters has a tradition. <br />
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'''Let’s talk about your programs. . .Risky Rescue (April 1984 issue of Antic)'''<br />
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“Risky Rescue,” my first published game, was inspired by Nintendo magnate Shigeru Miyamoto’s “Donkey Kong,” (not a terrible game-designer to be influenced by); but I had actually submitted two games to Antic before then, “Box-In” and “Titan Tumble” (“Titan Tumble” was a “Lunar Lander”-type game). Antic accepted these games, but lost them, and did not publish “Box-In” till I reminded them of it later. “Box-In” itself was like a game I saw on an Apple II computer at Bend High School— published by Beagle Bros. I have lost my copy of “Titan Tumble,” so it really has been lost forever. <br />
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Like “Box-In,” most of my first game programs were not original designs of mine (including one called “The Lost Ring,” which was based not on a computer game, but on a board-game called “The Sorcerer’s Cave”). I programmed a few games by converting programs listed for other kinds of computers in BYTE magazine, but most of my programs used “reverse engineering,” where I simply replicated the output with my own code. <br />
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'''Escape From Epsilon was published in June 1984.'''<br />
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“Escape from Epsilon,” my second game was based on the Atari 2600 game “Pitfall,” (hence the name BIFF-DROP), designed by David Crane of Activision (again, not a bad influence). It introduced Slyvester Biffdrop who, as I forgot to inform Antic, was a duck (hence his Antic illustration changed from an Indiana Jones-type human for “Escape from Epsilon,” to a duck for “Biffdrop”). Slyvester was to be joined by his female relative, Sylvia Biffdrop, in “Operation: Omega.” I wanted to be more inclusive in that game, and was also going to add the option of using the joystick in a left-handed manner as well the gender option. The fully assembly-language program was never finished because the game design was beyond the capabilities of the 8-bit Atari, and as I began to scale back the number of moving objects on the screen, I realized it was not going to be original enough to merit the programming effort— it was much like “Pitfall” combined with William “Cathryn” Mataga’s smooth scrolling “Zeppelin” published by Synapse Software.<br />
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“Operation: Omega” did have a special level that was randomly generated with each new game— I completed this part of the game programming). I moved on to other projects that were more original (like “Rebound” and what I consider my best and most original game design, “Maximillian B.”)— and I liked the idea of the Omega, or last game, being unfinished.<br />
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'''Advent X-5 was published in Antic’s November 1984 issue.'''<br />
<br />
With my 3rd Antic game, “Advent X-5,” I ventured into the text adventure territory— I had played some of Scott Adam’s adventures, and had also designed some Dungeons and Dragons modules (having been deep into the nerd scene at that time). The language parser I designed was my first study of the relation between computers and natural language, an area of study that continues to fascinate me. I had to overcome the programming obstacle that, with Atari BASIC, you couldn’t have two vectors on a String variable— you couldn’t simply define ROOM$(1) as “The Ship’s Bridge”, and ROOM$(5) as “The Medical Lab”; but Atari BASIC did allow for a you to use the RESTORE operation to point to a specific DATA line; so I simply used that to use a numerical variable to address a specific text string (each room/area and object needing to have a number value associated with a text description). My original hand-drawn map for “Advent X-5” betrays my youth at the time— and at that time I did not realize that my science-fiction (and hence future oriented, or “prophetic”) “word” game’s title had a Christian definition, meaning, “the coming of Christ,” and that the floor plan of the ship was loosely shaped like a cross (much like the floor plans of many cathedrals). The unfinished sequel, “Klybex-7,” was to involve a return to the escaped from planet to rescue the animals left behind on the somewhat limited “Noah’s Arc” Advent X-5 spaceship. Antic put my name on the cover with the issue containing “Advent X-5,” which was quite a thrill to see at my local Fred Meyer department store— almost as exciting as the surprise discovery that “Escape from Epsilon” was going to be published by reading the “coming in the next issue” blurb in Antic, before the editors had told me that it had been accepted.<br />
<br />
'''Then there was Biffdrop in the December 1984 issue.'''<br />
<br />
With “Biffdrop,” “Rebound,” and “Maximillian B.” I began to make games with more complex screen levels that were often “crammed” with as many novel uses of the obstacles as I could muster. Designing the screen levels was a lot of fun, and I therefore asked Antic to publish the “Rebound Construction Kit,” and conduct a contest which I would judge. Happily they agreed, and even though I did not receive as many submissions to judge as I would have liked, I still had to use Federal Express’s overnight delivery to get the winning screens to Antic on time. The rare version of “Rebound” with the winners’ screen levels on it can be found on my jdcasten.info website.<br />
<br />
The “Aunt Icked” character from the “Biffdrop” & “Maximillian B.” story lines was a play on the “Antic Ed.” moniker— and the Antic editors were always kind and courteous to me, even when I haggled up the payment for “Maximilian B.” from $150 to $200 on the phone.<br />
<br />
I was noticing, when going over the scans, that Antic must have wanted to publish Maximillian B as a disk bonus in order to get more sales of their disks-- the logic of "the game is too long to fit on a disk" didn't make sense to me, as it was a disk bonus-- and my original code did not have the special characters. I guess they must have been balancing a money-making idea with trying to not seem greedy. They were frequently lapse in responding and paying, but now that I've tried being on the "other side" of publishing (with my micro-publisher / music label / web gallery Post Egoism Media), I can see the issues involved when dealing with "talent"-- and all the hard work that it takes to get that talent exposure. Plus, I was just a kid.<br />
<br />
The software catalogue publishing division of Antic was a little less professional— usually late with their royalty payments to me for The Casten Game Disk, and completely forgetting to tell me the status of my submission of The Banzai Font Designer (which I thought was pretty good), for which they finally sent me a form-rejection letter after I called them about it. That, in late 1986, was near the end of my relation with Antic.<br />
<br />
My last programs were made in 1986; but by the late 1980’s, I was quite busy in college at the University of Oregon, having joined the Oregon Army National Guard (which included a stint at Infantry Boot Camp), becoming the Public Relations Officer for my local Alpha Tau Omega fraternity, getting into poetry and helping edit the university’s poetry journal, and finding my way to what I hoped would be my future.<br />
<br />
'''In 1984, Antic did a profile of you, calling you their "star game programmer". You were a sophomore in high school. Was that weird? What did you family and friends think of that?''' <br />
(http://www.atarimagazines.com/v3n8/Biffdrop.html)<br />
<br />
Antic did that profile after interviewing me by phone— an interesting experience, as it looked to me like they altered my responses to fit a certain “whiz-kid-nerd” image they wanted to portray. I’ve heard some famous folks bemoan that interviewers take quotes out of context and what-not— but this was not at all a public pillory, and despite my obliviousness, the “success” I’d achieved was hammered in by my ecstatically proud step-dad. My best friend at the time played through “Biffdrop” (I altered the code to give him “infinite lives”— as I did for myself to playtest the games)— but for the most part, it was a “private-time” project— I only met one person in Eugene who knew about my games outside of knowing them through me. A science teacher at Willamette High School was impressed, and I did get a special award-plaque created just for me and my advanced programming skills in the computer classes.<br />
<br />
Since high school, I’ve studied “cultural criticism”— and have a more educated perception on being known (I’m a fan of the culture-critic artist Nick “Momus” Currie, whose been quoted as saying, “in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen people”— a take on the Andy Warhol quote which pointed towards the internet and everyone writing themselves out in a blog and selfie-image) No one, not even Jesus, is 100% famous; it’s always a matter of degree, and demographic saturation. You really couldn’t be less well-known, and still be somewhat known internationally, than I was— a sort of “proto-micro-computer-celebrity.” Like my starting my micro-publishing effort Post Egoism Media, that experience was sort of like hitting the “big-time” in miniature— I’ve gotten to see many of the elements involved with such public projects (the massive amount of work that promotion takes to get something or someone known— just about every public work you’ve seen has been promoted by someone, usually for money, unless they’re your next-door neighbor’s garage band— this exposure requires not just one, but a long series of “lucky breaks,” etc.) Fortunately for me, I haven’t had to deal with the downsides— no “gilded cage,” paparazzi, etc.— not even close— just an occasional (about once or twice a year) email from someone out of the blue feeling nostalgic.<br />
<br />
Overall, my experience with Antic was positive— I got a couple of fan letters, was called their “star” game programmer, and quite importantly to me at the time, I earned enough money to pay for my computer and its upgrades (I was paid about $60 per published page— If I had been less oblivious, I would have included more text on how the programs themselves worked). I have been glad to hear that a few people did learn a bit about programming (and maybe game-design) by typing in my programs, which typing may have turned out to be as “important” for some as the frustrating entertainment of the games themselves. <br />
<br />
I have mused that my schizophrenia was the result of some sort of karma due to numerous frustrated gamers cursing me (I did find through a little research, that my disease had nothing to do with the fact that I had stolen and ingested a dose of LSD that belonged to a friend of my Mom’s when I was two years old— this landmark experience was my first clear memory, and I think helped shape my future aspirations to become an artist of some sort).<br />
<br />
'''Let’s talk about Easy-80, the 80-column driver. Why did you create that? A departure from your usual game things. Why did you create it?'''<br />
<br />
I’d actually made non-game programs before—usually to aid in the design of the games (e.g. BFD – the Banzai Font Designer used for Rebound’s animated character graphics). I don’t recall the exact purpose for creating Easy-80, but there was a limitation of word-processors on the Atari where the screen could not replicate the proper line breaks that would appear in printer output. I used the term “driver” in the 1987 documentation— an “80 column driver”— not exactly like contemporary software-hardware interfacing, and I’m not sure where I got that term, but it seemed in line with future developments, re: giving more complicated mediation and tools between a program and the input/output than the older operating systems less developed than Windows or Mac OS provided.<br />
<br />
The machine code addresses the problem of splitting the eight display pixels that parallel a memory byte into two four pixel columns: each character in Easy-80 is four pixels wide, so I designed a character set where each character is a double, like “AA” or “BB”—and the code would simply overly a left “A” or right “A” based on positioning (e.g. a logical OR can simply turn on pixels in the left character column, while not turning off the pixels in the right column when adding a new character in a series). <br />
<br />
'''You had some unpublished things -- the Banzai Font Designer and Operation Omega. Can you talk about those? Why did you create them and why didn't get they get published? Why did you abandon Operation Omega?''' <br />
<br />
Again, Banzai Font Designer was part of the Rebound project—and fit with my turn towards the “Rebound Construction Kit” too, in that I thought design tools were empowering (as I liked making the games more than playing them). There were other graphic-design programs, and I’d seen a “paint” program that had the sort of “Zoom” magnification on a scrolling field that I used in BFD. I use graphics and music software extensively with my art now (e.g. Ableton Live and Adobe products)— but contemporary fonts used vector programming—having a something like “curve-codes” for each letter is much different than pixel font design. Evidently, Antic software was designing an assembly language font designer in-house, as when I asked them about the submission status quite a long time after submission, they said they were declining to publish, in favor of the in-house program.<br />
<br />
Operation: Omega was never finished—abandoned due to my over-estimation of the efficiency of machine-code. I did not estimate the code-cycles, and the vertical blank interrupt I was using to sync the graphics (no flickering, and mid-graphic motion break-up), could in no way handle all the motion.<br />
<br />
I think the random Sigma level generator would have made Operation: Omega a stand-out: a new level with each new game. The “maze” generator code was finished, using a wandering exploration algorithm (sort of like exploring a problem space in AI—the tree branches out, hits a dead-end, back-tracks to another opening, and then branches out again, until the space is saturated)—I modified that prior programming solution (not sure where it originated) by using “elbow” graphic pieces—a maze made with the lines, T’s and crosses that parallel the “map-obstacle” pieces in the play levels. I had not yet designed the other four, non-random levels, and probably should have made the Omega level the random one (sort of like my game Nemesis— Nemesis has a spectacular finale… but starts over again and again, with ever more difficulty, until it is impossible). I like the idea of an endless ending.<br />
<br />
'''Initially, years ago, when I asked you to share Operation Omega you said no. . . what made you change your mind?'''<br />
<br />
I’ve changed my mind about sharing the code because I’m older and more relaxed. There’s no “zero-sum” where someone loses for someone else to win here, so, why not? I’ve learned to let go of opinions I might have fought for before, just because I had them— maturing can mean letting go, being less uptight, and admitting mistakes. But different folks need to learn different lessons in life, and I’ve known others who are too slack— letting either themselves or others act without enough care.<br />
<br />
'''You’ve just shared with me all of the programs that you’ve written, some of which have never been published before. Thank you -- the Atari community thanks you. (Listeners: I’ve uploaded these to Archive.org and there’s a link in the show notes.) Please tell me about them.'''<br />
<br />
• “Empire” (1982) is a “Santa Paravia” Hamurabai- clone game (1978, by Rev George Blank, published in SoftSide magazine)—a simulation of a game I played on the TRS-80 in the late 1970s—my first major 8-bit Atari program (simulating observed output with own code):<br />
http://www.santaparavia.com/History.aspx<br />
<br />
• “Maze 5x5x5” (1982) An example of my “program translation” – this was an Apple II program by Robert Tsuk called “Quint-Maze” from a 1982 BYTE magazine issue that I converted to Atari. https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1982-09/1982_09_BYTE_07-09_Computers_and_the_Disabled#page/n25/mode/2up<br />
<br />
• “Castles” (1982)<br />
A replication of an 1980 Apple game I saw, called “Artillery”—I figured out the math equations to simulate a projectile trajectory influenced by gravity, wind, and gun-powder-force by trial and error: had no clue about Newton or Calculus yet (Newton’s Calculus ties into gravity since both are about calculating rates of change—the falling object accelerates). In the early 90’s I’d taken a similar approach to Parallel Distributed Programming, coming up with a more efficient solution due to the textbooks at the time being too elliptical and pithy about the math implementation of the general approach (PDP networks do a sort of stimulus-response pairing that gets trained over cycles of adjusting output to input—this method is used in language recognition and predicting stock-market turns, etc.): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game<br />
<br />
• “Space Barrier” (1982) My friend Jamie Sutherland (who published two games in Antic, “Arena Racer” and “Valiant”) had a Commodore Vic-20 before getting an Atari—and the Vic-20 also had a 6502 CPU. Jamie got into 6502 machine code before I did… which gave me some confidence to try that… “Space Barrier” was his design, and after I saw his version, I made my own.<br />
http://www.atarimagazines.com/index/index.php?author=Jamie+Sutherland&mag=antic<br />
<br />
•“Pac-er” (1982) A Pac-Man clone—Pac-Man was made in 1980—I gave the smash video-game hit a try. My ghost “AI” was like the monster in Box-In—I didn’t include the “wandering” that the arcade game ghosts would do—these ghosts float in your direction, until they hit an obstacle. I don’t think I’ve shared this before.<br />
<br />
•“The Lost Ring” (1983) A “Dungeons & Dragons”-type one-player turn-based game based on a “board” game I had called “Sorcerer’s Cave.” I actually had fun playing this game, and don’t know why I didn’t submit it to Antic—might have been thinking of the “originality” issues—which is strange, given that my first published games were transformations of popular video games. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorcerer's_Cave<br />
<br />
• “SNAFU” (1987) Unfinished game (due to the decline of 8-bit Atari use). This would have been the first of my games to use the sort of mixed-multi-color character-graphics found in many Synapse software games. I think it is a good design: original control (you walk, and reverse gravity for vertical movement) + an interesting twist (the entire screen can flip upside-down at key moments). The game play programming is finished; there is simply just one screen—more screen level designs would have completed the game.<br />
<br />
'''Do you still have an Atari?'''<br />
<br />
Yes, I have an Atari 130XE and my original Atari 400 (with 48K and a full-stroke keyboard replacing that awful membrane thing)— plus I have a Trak disk drive and the 410 cassette drive. They’re packed away though, and when I want to check out 8-bit Atari stuff, I use the Atari800Win PLus 4.1 emulator on my home-built PC. I never got the 16-bit Atari ST, instead using my Atari 130XE until 1994 when I finally got a PC with Microsoft Windows 3.1 and began to explore the internet via a phone-line (I’d heard of Compuserve and GE’s modem services, but did not have the money back in the 80’s to buy a modem or pay the service charges). I began system building around the turn of the millennium, usually starting a computer with an overclocking ASUS motherboard. I know many artists prefer Apples— I like Macintosh computers too (a roommate had one in 1989), but I’ve gone the PC route due to wanting more software/hardware system control, more video games to play; and also because I prefer the Windows decentralized hardware approach to the Apple “vertical monopoly” over both the OS and hardware. I’ve converted most of my websites to be mobile (replacing Flash with Java)— it took me too long to realize the value of mobile computing; although I still mostly use a desktop PC, smart-phones have opened up the computing and internet-information world to many more folks— non-techies, and those with less money, rural folks with no cable or phone-lines etc. <br />
<br />
'''What do you do today (professionally and for fun)?'''<br />
<br />
I’m a professional schizophrenic, paid Social Security disability to bare the weight of civilization. Yes, that’s a joke, but the post-structuralism philosopher Michel Foucault suggests that the world is defined by oppositions, much like a fence will divide one space from another, or juxtaposed colors, like red and green, will make each other “pop-out” due to the contrast— in the same way, “reasonable” civilization can be said to be defined in opposition to “unreasonable” madness. Due to the 24/7 conference call going on in my head (even in some dreams, if I’m self-aware)— I haven’t been able to devise any new life-goals since college. But I’ve done my best to complete my early dreams, if only in miniature. I run Post Egoism Media, a micro-press and music-label that offers free digital content and physical products printed-on-demand. Music is the easiest to promote, and my solo and collaborative works have charted on some college radio stations, played on BBC 6, and have been downloaded extensively via free torrents. Due to the internal verbal interference, I can’t write poetry, and my academic writing has been limited more to “reporting” than developing original work. I try to keep up on contemporary music, and know quite a few DJs in the Eugene area—occasionally going to a local concert. I also have an art collection worth over a billion dollars— but it’s all in art-book reproductions. My favorite artist/poets are Katsushika Hokusai and William Blake. <br />
<br />
'''Last year you wrote a book about artificial intelligence. Tell me about it.'''<br />
<br />
I started researching AI in high school. Back then, my approach was “top-down,” thinking in terms of how to program intelligence, rather than how to construct it via neuron engineering, or other “bottom-up” approaches. Text adventures provide a window into early AI, with the text-parsing, and “micro-worlds” that limit the full detail and complex context of the real world. In college, my interest in artificial intelligence was renewed when I started to study French Structuralism and its emphasis on the network-like connections among concepts in language. I had read that AI needed advances in philosophy as well is in cognitive psychology, and philosophy provided a way for me to combine my interests in information science and aesthetics (esp. poetry and visual art). Deconstruction was popular in college English departments in the 80s, and I found it challenging and inspiring. Deconstruction can be about showing how something, like a poem or cultural phenomenon, is constructed— the assumptions, processes, history, etc. that go into making up much of what we take at face-value. Artificial Intelligence has yet to be created though, so my book on “Deconstructing Artificial Intelligence” focuses on the history that has led to the “state-of-the-art” on our understanding of intelligence. Usually people think about an “intelligent agent”— an individual facing a problem that they must work out alone, just using their brain. But cultural advances like the “scientific method” demonstrate that much of what we call intelligence or knowledge has evolved through society and the “global brain.” And the flip-side of information science is consciousness— although the function of the Thalamus in the brain might parallel a CPU-like Turing Machine read/write head (remember those old real-to-real computers, where the tapes reals would spin, stop, and reverse?— that’s a Turing Machine)— although obvious pragmatic value that that sort of locus of focus on attention gives (the 18th century philosopher Kant studied focal attention with his concept of “Apperception” too)— much of what we call conscious awareness has nothing to do with objective mechanisms, but connects with subjective experience (qualitative sensation, emotions, etc.) Although my book “Cybernetic Revelation” is over 700 pages, it is introductory— aiming to help with inter-disciplinary studies that could tie, for example, specialists in cognitive science to the work of French critical thinkers who can be difficult to pin down. The book is fairly straightforward— it doesn’t teach critical thinking, but it “has the goods” as far as identifying the deep “conceptual engineering” structures developed by the greatest Western philosophers. “Cybernetic Revelation” doesn’t provide programming strategies, but gives clues concerning how to think about intelligence in general preliminary to going into specifics on how to simulate it— and, in my estimation, human intelligence is not a finished project, but will continue to be revolutionized, reformed, and refined.<br />
<br />
'''What about computer games today?'''<br />
<br />
Game design has really evolved since the 1980’s, especially with their entrance into three-dimensional space; one of my favorites (that my nephew has shown me) is the Shigeru Miyamoto directed “The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker,” with its stylized cartoon graphics, complex obstacle laden environment to explore, ease of entry, and difficult to master puzzles. If you were to combine Miyamoto’s game design with a little Dr. Seuss whimsical odd playfulness (his playfulness with both the visual and the verbal— but also with his emphasis on ethics and psychology; I love Dr. Seuss’ take on ecological commitment in “The Lorax,” and the encouragement of a strong healthy ego in “Happy Birthday to You”)— if you were to mix Shigeru Miyamoto and Dr. Seuss, I think you’d have an idea of the sort of games I’d like to see produced. There’s a place for the many hyper-realistic mature-rated games out today that I think try to compensate for the fact that the environment is simulated, and not real, by using shock and horror (fear being a “reality” inducer— fear can make us take things as if they were more real, vivid and important); but I have a greater appreciation for those games that appeal to various ages, genders, etc. by evoking positive emotions that draw you into the game with a “willing suspension of disbelief,” though humor, intrigue, and possibly an awe born not of shock, but of admiration. A really good epic game— as a work of art— should probably induce a broad range of emotions, and provoke thought in a multitude of ways— ART itself offering a profound and influential kind of education in ethical psychology, and also an exploration into who we humans think we are.<br />
<br />
'''If you could send a message to the Atari community -- and you can, right now :) -- what would you tell them?'''<br />
<br />
I’d like to apologize for the many emotional freak-outs that some of my more challenging games must have fostered. I’d like to thank those folks who have contacted me with questions and comments— quite a large portion of those who’ve contacted me had gone on to become programmers themselves. My original thinking about my Antic games was that I was providing art-entertainment— which I see as a good thing in itself. But as I’ve come to develop my own artistic maturity, I think edutainment is even more commendable, and having helping folks learn about computers via my type-in games— I find the results were better than I anticipated. Also, with the demise of 8-bit computers in the late 80s, I thought all my work was lost in the past— which added weight to my life-choices aimed at pursuing more stable, time-tested mediums like poetry and visual art. I was wrong though, and I’ve come to see that “being of your time” can be the best way to be “timeless.” And always feel free to contact me, I return emails and enjoy hearing from my Atari friends near and far.<br />
<br />
I enjoy being part of a community that I’m surprised still exists.</div>Mauryhttps://www.computingpioneers.com/index.php?title=Wayne_Green&diff=194Wayne Green2021-10-20T00:00:15Z<p>Maury: </p>
<hr />
<div>This is a transcript of an audio interview. This transcript may contain errors - if you're using this material for research, etc. please verify with the original recorded interview.<br />
<br />
Source: Floppy Days vintage computing podcast<br />
<br />
Source URL: http://floppydays.libsyn.com/floppy-days-48-kevin-savetz-interviews-wayne-green and https://archive.org/details/WayneGreenInterview<br />
<br />
Interviewer: Kevin Savetz<br />
<br />
Wayne Green was founder of 73 magazine; Byte magazine; Kilobyte, which became Kilobaud, then Kilobaud Microcomputing; 80 Micro magazine for the TRS-80; Hot Coco for the TRS-80 Color Computer; Run for the Commodore 64, inCider magazine for the Apple II; and several other computer magazines. <br />
<br />
This interview took place over Skype on January 29, 2013, when Kevin was doing research for a book about the very first personal computer magazines — Byte, Kilobyte, and Creative Computing. Although he decided not to write the book, he is publishing the interviews. Wayne Green died on September 13, 2013, eight months after this interview.<br />
<br />
----<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wikipedia, which is never wrong, [sarcastically] says you were born in 1922. Is that right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yep. Why sure!<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yep. Why sure! That's New Hampshire for yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was my next question. It says you live in Hancock, New Hampshire.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yep.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Mostly I want to start talking about "Kilobaud," but before we get there, the first magazine you published was "73", is that right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well the first magazine, yeah. I published an extended news journal before that that got to 64 pages and had 2000 subscribers, called "Amateur Radio Frontiers." Then in 1960 I started "73 Magazine" for amateur radio and published that for 43 years. It was always about new HAM technologies.<br />
<br />
This is fun, this is fun, let's do this, let's do this, and so forth and then I ran out of them and I said, "Well, it was never about making money," although it did make a good deal of money, but I've never done anything saying "Hey I can make money." It's always "Someone needs to do this." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent! 73...you stopped at what year?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Two double-O, three.<br />
<br />
Kevin: 2003, OK. You started with that, had you any magazine publishing experience before that?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well just that Amateur Radio Frontiers that's all, and oh, yes, when I did Amateur Radio Frontiers, it started out about radio teletype, M teletype, and that got me a column in "CQ Magazine" one of the 2 HAM magazines, and then I got the editor a better job, he wasn't a HAM, I got him a better job with a new magazine that was starting and they hired me on as editor for five years and I did very nicely, had a wonderful time there so I learned all about publishing.<br />
<br />
Then the publisher, who is not a HAM either, bought a yacht, got overextended and got a year behind on paying my salary, so he fired me. I said, "Well, this is so much fun." I had just enough money to publish the first issue of "73." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wow.<br />
<br />
Wayne: That's how I got into that, but yes, I had experience with publishing with CQ. I knew the advertisers, they knew me, the readers knew me, and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was "Byte" your idea, or how did you get moved from HAM radio into computing?<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK, well, I kept getting more and more articles for 73 on computers by computer hobbyists that were tied in with HAM radio. Then one of my advertisers, MITS, Micro Instrument Telemetry Service, had been advertising with me. They put out a $129 four-banger calculator, adding machine, a little adding pad and so forth.<br />
<br />
All of a sudden, one of the Japanese companies came out with one for about $20, [laughs] and put him out of business. He had been making computers as a hobby, so he put together the Altair 8800 using the 8080 chip from Intel, and put it on the market, and I read about that, and I said, "Ah-hah. I think this is going to be..."<br />
<br />
I thought up a short name for a magazine in the field, and I came up with "Byte," which I thought was right on mark. [laughs] I wrote to all of the companies that were making equipment that the hobbyists were using, and said, "Please send me your mailing lists, the people who have asked for information or that have bought from you." I kept getting shoeboxes full of these names and addresses, and I sent them out, and I was getting a 20 percent response. Now on direct mail, one percent is good. [laughs] I started publishing Byte Magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You wrote to these companies saying, please send me the list of people interested in your products...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right.<br />
<br />
Kevin: ...and then you mailed them about Byte Magazine?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is that right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Now, unfortunately, at that time, I had trouble with the IRS. One of my ad salesmen for 73 made a big mistake and offered a free ad to people who would start advertising with us. Well, immediately my competition told everybody about that and everybody that was advertising wanted a free ad. I had to fire the guy.<br />
<br />
Well he got even by telling the IRS that I was hiding money and the IRS came in and made life miserable. They came in and said, OK all this furniture in your office here that's a personal expense not a business expense, and you've had it for five or seven years so therefore you owe so much a year on that. Oh, this big camera that you're using for your photography, that's a two thousand dollar expense that was personal.<br />
<br />
They did one thing after another and built it up to where I owed about twenty thousand dollars and [laughs] took me to court. [laughs] At any rate, when I started the new magazine the lawyer said, well you better put it in somebody else's name for the time being. I had gotten back together with my first wife, who is now an ex-wife, and we had split up ten years before, and we got back together, and so I put it in her name, big mistake.<br />
<br />
After five issues, the magazine was going great guns and I came back from giving a talk one night and the magazine was gone, everything. All the files [laughs] , everything, was gone.<br />
<br />
Kevin: We're talking file cabinets, and pages laid out, and everything was just...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Everything got moved out, all the back issues and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you think you were robbed? What was your initial thought?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I knew right away what happened. I tried to get in touch with her. She said, "Oh, yes. We took the magazine."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Why do you think that happened? Why did she do that?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Because it was worth a lot of money. She published it for a few issues and then sold it to McGraw-Hill for $7 million dollars. Within a year or so it was billing over $1 million a month in ad sales and it got up to 800 pages a month, magazine. In the meantime I started to put out a magazine called "Kilobyte." and they threatened to sue, so I made it "Kilobaud." Then I put out one called "Desktop Computing", which was in plain English, not computerese, for business men.<br />
<br />
When Apple came out with their... well first I started with the Radio Shack computer, which was the biggest seller. They had 20 percent of the market with their TRS-80. I put out an "80 Micro" magazine. That got to be the third largest magazine in the country at 500 pages a month. [laughs] The reason Radio Shack got into this is because when I first got started with Byte I took the first issue with me down to MITS in Albuquerque.<br />
<br />
Then I stopped off in Fort Worth, Texas and visited an advertiser of mine in 73 who had a radio store there and showed him. I said this is going to be the big future. At any rate, then I went down to San Antonio where they were putting out a keyboard. I got an 8800 computer from MITS, the keyboard from the other place, and I made it work, and I said, "That's it, this is going to be great."<br />
<br />
I started "Byte Magazine," and at any rate the chap that I talked to in Fort Worth closed his store, went to work for Radio Shack, and the next thing I know they had a factory down there making TRS80's, and he was the head of it.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: That's a good gig.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right. But that got to be, as I said 20 percent of the market, and a couple of hundred small companies in there. I put out the magazine for that, and then I put out one for the color computer, called "Hot Cocoa." I put out another one called "Run."<br />
<br />
Kevin: For the Commodore, right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I put out one for the Apple, and I put out one for dealers called Selling Micros, and so forth and I covered the field pretty well. There was a big need for software, so I started Instant Software Company, and I brought a local motel that had 12 offices for me instead of rooms. I took the center part where they had a big restaurant, and made that into a computer lab and got a bunch of computers, and hired on a lot of programmers.<br />
<br />
What I did was have the readers, send in any program that they made, and we would market it for them. Pretty soon, I had a couple of hundred programs on there. I had all kinds, business programs, educational programs, entertainment programs and so forth, and we were the largest software dealer there, in the industry for a while. Anyway, I kept going with that, and finally I said, "Well, done that, [chuckles] done that."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Seems like for a while, you must have had many employees, filling up your 12 offices. How big was your empire?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I had over 250. When I brought the building next door to mine...My building wasn't bad, 40 rooms. The one next door was a little smaller, and then bought the motel, and another building up in North Peterborough for the books that we were putting out, and we put out a lot of books. We had a shipping department out in West Peterborough. [laughs] I don't know I'm like that, we grew and grew.<br />
<br />
Finally, I said, "Well I've done that, and I want to move on." Compact disks have come out, and the industry is ignoring them. The Music Magazines, Hi-Fi Magazines won't have anything to do with them, they say, "Well, we're always going to have LP's, so we don't need a new medium", and I said, "Boloney." First, I sold all my computer magazines to computer world, and got 16 million dollars for that to work with.<br />
<br />
I then started a "CD" review magazine, which within the year, became the largest music magazine, and "CD's" were in. [laughs] I built a studio, I got interested in ragtime. I went to see the movie "The Sting," and they had...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Scott Joplin.<br />
<br />
Wayne: ...this Scott Joplin music there, and I said "Wow, where have I been? How did I miss this?" I'd always been a classical music fan since I was seven years old and was first exposed to it. It was an instant take on classical.<br />
<br />
I was down in New Orleans at a music conference and I was walking along the street with my wife and I heard Scott Joplin music coming out of this bar. I'd been very disappointed, I'd bought every LP I could find on Scott Joplin, and the performers were all mechanical. They didn't feel the music, and I felt it. This guy, Scott Kirby, felt it. I went in and we sat down and had a couple Cokes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: This Scott Kirby guy is playing live in the venue?<br />
<br />
Wayne: He was playing in this bar, and I brought him to New Hampshire and we made a CD of Scott Joplin music and the result was so spectacular that I built us a $100,000 studio, one of the real state-of-the-art. No two walls parallel anywhere, and one wall all mirrors on hinges, with sponge spikes behind. You could vary the liveliness of the room however you wanted it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Bought a huge grand piano and so forth, and like that, so anyway, we put out a whole bunch of CD's.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Hold on a second. [pause] Sorry.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well anyway, that's how computers got started. That was the start of the whole industry was because there was computer hobbyist groups. That's who I was catering to with "Byte" to start with.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I want to go back to a couple of things. First of all, you said you sold all your magazines to Computer World.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You just felt done?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They were humming along. They're probably doing pretty well.<br />
<br />
Wayne: They were doing very well, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You were just bored with it?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah, I had to move on. Yes. Just like with 73, when I ran out of new things, I closed it. With computers, I ran out of new things. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Going back even farther, when your ex-wife took the magazine from you, how did you feel? Did you feel betrayed, or was it just like an opportunity?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, sure. I sued her a little bit and settled for $100,000, which she never paid. That's what it cost me to start it. No big deal. I've never worried about money, never fussed about it. It's not important to me. Getting things done, sharing, is the big deal for me. When I find something fun, interesting, I have to share it. And that's what gets the magazines started and so forth.<br />
<br />
After CDs, I got that going. Then I sold that magazine. The next interest was Cold Fusion. I'd heard about it, and I heard more and more as I investigated. And I went out to a Cold Fusion conference out in...<br />
<br />
Kevin: What year are we talking here?<br />
<br />
Wayne: 1993. I went out to a cold fusion conference on Maui, in the Hawaiian Islands. I went there a little early so I could scuba dive all six islands. As a result of going to that, I decided to start "Cold Fusion" magazine. I hired on Gene Mallove as the editor. He had worked for MIT in their publications department. MIT was one of the early places where they tested cold fusion. They sent out a report saying it didn't work.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was this the nuclear reaction in a coffee cup thing that was...am I thinking of the right thing?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah. I can give you a simple explanation of it. But anyway, Mallove looked into it and he said, "Hey, you fudged these figures." They said, "Shut up. We're getting millions for hot fusion research. Shut the hell up," so he quit. I met him at the conference and hired him on to edit the magazine.<br />
<br />
The magazine took off. Of course, when we got ready to print the fourth issue, I came into the office one day and everything was gone. Everything was cleaned out. He moved up to Maine and put out his own magazine there using all my magazine articles that had been submitted and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: This had to seem familiar?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yes, right. I hired a guy from Vermont who was an expert, but he was in lunatic asylum. I got him out and hired him on. We put out the magazine in reduced form for 28 issues. We published all the scientific papers by the top physicists on exactly how and why this works. Jim Patterson, an inventor down in Sarasota, Florida, demonstrated a cold fusion cell at an energy conference.<br />
<br />
It was about the size of a coffee mug. He had one watt of electricity going in and 1,000 watts of heat coming out for the length of this show. What you do is you take powdered nickel and put it in water. Then you pass electric currents through the water which separates it into hydrogen and oxygen, OK, you with me?<br />
<br />
The hydrogen is absorbed by the nickel which is like a sponge. The Oxygen molecule is too big, and it passes off. Of course, you use the powder so you have the maximum surface area on the Carbon. Pardon me, on the Nickel.<br />
<br />
When it gets 82 percent full of Hydrogen, it begins to combine with the Nickel to make Copper which is the next one up on the Scale of Atomic Weight. There's 0.2 mass left over, that's gone. If you look at Albert Einstein's e=mc^2. Energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light. A tiny but of mass lost is equal to a huge amount of energy which comes off as heat.<br />
<br />
When you get it up to 82 percent it begins generating heat and will generate a lot of heat. What I look forward to is a unit in every building's basement that generates all the heat and the electricity that you can use for almost nothing, less than a thousandth the cost of oil. It uses very little Nickel to generate an awful lot of energy.<br />
<br />
The Department of Energy, no doubt urged by the Oil Industry, and at that time the Bush's were President. They were oil people from way back. The Department of Energy sent out a message to all the colleges and universities, "If you do any research on Cold Fusion on an undergraduate level you get no more money from the government for anything." Then they went to the Patent Office and said, "You're not to even look at patent applications for Cold Fusion."<br />
<br />
Then the head of the Department of Energy put out a book, Zenga, called "Cold Fusion, the Fiasco of the Century." They buried it. There's some science that it's being re-interred if you look at E-cat. Looks like Andrea Rossi may be getting going with it. It is the future, it is the way things are going to go. It has to.<br />
<br />
It's one of three technologies that are going to totally change the world, totally. Not one, the next one is the Takahashi capacitor. If you're into electronics think of a capacitor one inch square, about an eighth of an inch thick that has one farad of capacity.<br />
<br />
Now, we all deal with millions of farad in all of our electronics. I drove scooter all over outer London one day, all day... powered by one of these capacitors, call it a battery, if you will. It was half the size of a Coca-Cola can. We're talking about a battery for cars or any vehicle about the size of a shoebox that will power a car for 500 miles, recharge in a few seconds, and of course your cold fusion is nonpolluting in any way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What's the third item?<br />
<br />
Wayne: The third item, a book came out by Dr. Bruno Comby called Maximize Immunity. He said, "Look, in every research project with dogs, cats, rats, mice and so forth, those fed the standard American diet were getting cancer, heart disease, and other human ailments and those fed raw food weren't. The ones on the American diet were living only half as long."<br />
<br />
They tried some rats and they took three groups of them. One fed raw food. The second fed the American diet. When they got to the age of 60, human age of 60, they did an autopsy to find out how they were.<br />
<br />
The ones on raw food were in perfect shape in every way. Those that survived on the human diet were in terrible shape. Their teeth were bad. Their guts were bad and so forth.<br />
<br />
The third group they put on the American diet with cooked food and when they got to be 30 years old, in the human context, they took them off that diet and put them on raw food. Those that survived that long they autopsied when they got to be the equivalent of 60 and all back in perfect shape again.<br />
<br />
Dr. Bruno Comby, not being real stupid, his hospital in Paris, Institute Comby and you can go to comby.com, Institute Comby. Put his patients on raw food diets and he said he was unable to find any incurable [chime] illnesses, none. Then, a few weeks after reading this, I heard Dr. Lorrain Day on the Art Bell show and she is or was a trauma surgeon in San Francisco and taught in hospitals.<br />
<br />
She got a breast cancer and you go to drday.com and you'll see that breast cancer. She knew that chemotherapy made everybody terribly sick and didn't save any lives, about 97 percent deaths on it. She didn't go that route. It got down to where the cancer went all through her body, and they gave her days to live, gave her last rites, and then she changed to a raw food diet, and total cure.<br />
<br />
Since then, she says she has found no incurable illnesses when you do this. There's a DVD out now, "Rawfor30 Days.com," which shows a group of people with long-term diabetes going on a 30-day raw food regime. At the end of 30 days, they were all totally cured of diabetes...all of them, type two diabetes.<br />
<br />
I said, "OK," and I wrote a book for Americans, since Bruno Comby is French. He did get an American translation. A fellow up in Canada did that for him. But he only had a limited printing of it, so I wrote my book, which went into all that with a lot more details on fluoride and the dangers of that, and so forth.<br />
<br />
That is where we stand, and that's the third one. If the word gets around on that, it's going to put the pharmaceutical industry out of business. That is our most profitable industry in the country. The top 10 pharmaceutical companies make more profits than the other 390 companies on the Forbes 400 list combined. We're talking $3 trillion if you get sick, and nothing if you get healthy...so there's no money in health. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Why don't we get back to...<br />
<br />
Wayne: That's the three. Oh, get back to computers.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Computer magazines.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Serves you right.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sorry. [laughs] You're writing a book about health. I'm writing a book about computer magazines.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well, I knew all the beginners.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sorry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I knew everybody in the field at the beginning.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah? Tell me interesting people you met.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, I don't know. Let's see... well Bill Godbout. He put out Godbout computers for a while.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You went to a lot of conferences, early computer conferences, I assume?<br />
<br />
Wayne: How about Steve Jobs? Maybe you read my thing on that, where I heard about the Apple computer, so my wife and I stopped by to visit him. Took me out... well, first he called Steve Wozniak over, who designed and built the Apple I.<br />
<br />
They took me out to the garage and showed it to me and he said, "What do you think?" I said, "I think you've got a winner." I said, "Up 'til now, all of our computers had a motherboard. You plugged in the processor. You plugged in the memory. You plugged in the communication. You plugged in the keyboard." I said, "You've got it all on one board. That's the way to go."<br />
<br />
Jobs said, "Well, what'll we do?" I said, "Well, there's a first computer conference that's going to be in Atlantic City in two weeks. Be there." He said, "Oh, I can't afford to fly." I said, "Take a bus. Be there." I had my booth there for the magazine and right opposite of me was the Apple booth with Steve Jobs. At the end of show he came over he said, "Wayne! Wayne! I'm in business! I've got 12 orders!" [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent. What was the conference? What was it called?<br />
<br />
Wayne: It was a computer conference for microcomputers. Then a year later I stopped by to visit him and he had a laboratory at that time and I talked with him for a while. I said, "Well, you've got the Apple II here. How are you going to market that?"<br />
<br />
He said, "Well I'm going to sell it direct like we've been doing the Apple I." I said, "Well, we've got some computer stores now. Why don't you sell it through those?" "Oh, they'd take a discount. No, we're not going to do that."<br />
<br />
I said, "Alright, here's what you do first thing Steve, first thing. Hire a marketing manager." So he hired a marketing manager, Mike Markkula and learned it [laughs] and they sold through stores. The result was a very successful company.<br />
<br />
If I'd been able to get through the wall around Steve Jobs, he'd still be alive. I think he had pancreatic cancer. It's so easy to cure if you change to raw food. I'm 90 doing raw food.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I'm 90 years old and doing raw food. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Seems to be working for you. You had your editorial team, how does a typical issue go together?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, of which? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Let's go with microcomputing.<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Assuming Kilobaud...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well, whatever. Anyway, the articles would come in and I had an editor for each and we invested in a computer system for setting type. At first you had to set type with linotype and all that stuff in the early days and then finally got computerized. I was right at the beginning of all of those, one of the first adopters.<br />
<br />
I had a whole team of them in my 40 room house there, what had been a bowling alley part of the house we did for production and so forth. We all produced there. Then I added the other buildings, the one next door for the color computer and so forth.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I kept adding more buildings. The books came out of North Peterborough and we put out quite of few books there of software and other things.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Type in software books?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there ever any other negative feedback from advertisers who didn't like how a review came out or wanted things to be written a certain way?<br />
<br />
Wayne: No. I don't recall ever having trouble with advertisers in any way, no. They loved the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Talk about the typical reader of Kilobaud. Was it more of a hobbyist market than some other magazines?<br />
<br />
Wayne: It was all hobby at that time because you had computer clubs around the country and that was what it was.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you read computer magazines today?<br />
<br />
Wayne: No, done that. That's a "Been there, done that," same thing with amateur radio. Without new technologies I lost interest in that. I got interested in that...Well it first started when I was 12 and I went to church one day, to Sunday school. A fellow came in with a box of radio parts and asked my friend Alfie if he was interested and Alfie said, "No." "What about you Wayne?" I said, "You bet!"<br />
<br />
I took them home and there was an article in Popular Mechanics on building a cigar box radio. I had the parts so I built it and I was trapped for life. [laughs] I went into business selling postage stamps to make money for radio parts, always the entrepreneur, I'd buy 50 pound sacks of stamps torn off envelopes and then sell them in five pound lots and did a brisk business with that with ads in the stamp magazines.<br />
<br />
Anyway, that bought me the radio parts. Then I went to high school and they had a radio club and I went there, that's where I learned about amateur radio. Then the next thing you know I got my HAM radio license.<br />
<br />
Again, the forefront in amateur radio at that time was the microwave stuff and VHF. What did I do? I built a little two and half meter walkie-talkie and that was the first rig that I went on the air with when I got my HAM license, walking around town talking to friends on two and a half meters.<br />
<br />
Then of course the war came along so they closed down the HAM bands. I was going to college. I was in my second year at college by that time. I joined the Navy one day before the draft board got me.<br />
<br />
They were yanking me right out of college, so I made a good deal with the Navy on that. The fellow who worked for my dad...My dad was in aviation. He started the first transatlantic airline, American Export Airlines.<br />
<br />
One of the fellows that worked for him was in the reserves and got called back in when the war started and he put me in touch with a fellow who was running the lab, the electronics lab over in Virginia across the river from Washington DC. I went down and visited him, Commander Bourne and he said, "Wow! I want you on my staff."<br />
<br />
I joined the Navy and he said, "Now first we're going to send you to radio school, or electronic school in the Navy here for nine months and then we'll get going here. Let me know when you're out so I can do the papers to get you back here." I went to the electronic school, Radio Material School, graduated on top, number one. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Well I had been a C student all my life. At any rate, when I graduated I had a choice of getting in touch with Commander Bourne and going back to the lab. I said, "No. I'm more dispensable. Let's leave that for somebody with a wife and kids or something."<br />
<br />
I volunteered for submarine duty which was the most dangerous of all, they had the highest loss of any branch of the service because everybody that was in the submarines was on a submarine. They didn't have a large land support. The next thing you know I'm on a submarine, USS Drum, spent five war patrols on that and I've written a book on my adventures there and we were one of the top scoring boats.<br />
<br />
The boat is on display down in Alabama. At Mobile Alabama it's on display there and you can see pictures that I took 70 years ago of the crew and me, [laughs] and so forth. We had some very, very close escapes. I saved the boat personally twice with my fast action.<br />
<br />
I was the radar operator and of course when we were submerged I was on the sonar. Anyway, there's a lot of interesting stories there. After the war I got back into college again and became president of the radio club and I said, "Well golly. We need a radio station here." I started a wire broadcasting station.<br />
<br />
I went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute up in Troy, New York. I started WRPI and we did all kinds of interesting news and shows, plays and so forth, and brought girls in from the local girls' college for the girls' parts. Today, that is the largest student activity, is that radio station which is now an FM station.<br />
<br />
After I got out of college I went to work first for a radio station down in North Carolina. I got fed up with that and had an opportunity. The fellow who introduced me to classical music when I was seven had done an article on my dad's airport. My dad was hired to design and build and operate an airport for Philadelphia.<br />
<br />
He had done a survey for the Department of Commerce on all the airports around the country. He built the first concrete paved runway central airport there. He managed that until he quit and went to work for one of the first airlines, Ludington Airlines, which is owned by Tommy Ludington and Amelia Earhart. Amelia Earhart kept her plane at my dad's airport, the Lockheed, and I used to play in that when I was a kid. He had her over to dinner a number of times. I got to know her.<br />
<br />
I'm one of the few people that knows exactly what happened to her. Her mechanic was a good friend of my dad's. As a matter of fact, you can find on the Web where my dad is in the plane with Don Whemple when he married Ms. Philadelphia. They did it all in the air [laughs] with my dad being there. That made the... I found that on the Web. At any rate... on and on. [laughs] I'll do a book someday...<br />
<br />
Kevin: You should.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Volume one of 10.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well, anyway, that's how computers got started. Before that I did cell phones the same way. I was publishing the HAM magazine and a few HAM clubs put automatic repeaters or relays on top of mountains and tall buildings to extend the range of handy-talkies and mobiles. I said, "Wow, this is fun." I put one up on the local mountain, and it made it so that any mobile HAM anywhere in New England could talk to any other.<br />
<br />
I had a lot of fun with that and I had my little handy-talkie, talking through it and so forth. I put a bridge to 10 meters so they could talk all around the world there, if they wanted. I published hundreds of articles on repeaters, and a group out in Chicago put their repeater up on the top of the tallest building there, the Sears Tower, and had little receivers all spread around the outskirts of Chicago to pick up the mobile units and the handy-talkies and relay it through the Tower.<br />
<br />
I kept writing in my editorial and said, "Look, I'm able to ski the mountains of New Hampshire, Vermont, and Colorado, and Utah, and make telephone calls anywhere in the world through the local HAM repeater." I said, "Everybody's going to want to do this." Well, Art Householder, K9TRG, out in Chicago, was working for Motorola, and he took my editorials to the top people at Motorola, and he said, "Here," and that's where cell phones started. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Awesome.<br />
<br />
Wayne: But when I started, there were about half-a-dozen clubs with repeaters. By the time I got through publishing articles and a handbook and a list and so forth, there were over 8,000 repeaters around the country in the HAM clubs. I was flying from Johannesburg, South Africa... I was publishing with some computer magazines there, they invited me down.<br />
<br />
I said, "Well, I'll come down if you also include a trip to Swaziland and Lesotho", and they said, "Done." I was flying in a plane they hired for me from South Africa up to Mbanane in Swaziland. I was talking to the HAMs all around South Africa from the plane by way of the repeaters, and all of a sudden the Swaziland repeater came on, and I said, "That's it - we're everywhere." [laughs] Anyway, that's how cell phones got started.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Then, of course, when computers came along, I said, "I think I can...again." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: When you were starting the computer magazines, there was clubs. Were there other computer magazines that you started basing Byte and Kilobaud on? I don't know exactly the timeline of them, what came when, so...but you feel like you were the first.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, I was the first at it. By the time Radio Shack was big, they were going in everywhere. It was getting very popular. They were selling well. [laughs] The programs were coming on, making it so that you could write letters and send email and stuff like that, and the web was developing.<br />
<br />
Bill Gates, I met him first at MITS, when they had the first anniversary of their putting out their Altair 8800. They had a party, and I attended that, and we got asked, "Well, now, what do we do with these things?" The best that anybody could come up with was, "Well, you can use it to program the lawn watering." [laughs] That's all they could think of to do with them at that time. [laughs]<br />
<br />
But anyway, right a few days after Bill Gates started working there, he came in. I think he went to school at Harvard. As a part of a computer class, he did a program in BASIC. When the 8800 came out, there was no software for it at all, nothing, just some little switches on the front. He went down there with his BASIC, and they hired him on.<br />
<br />
IBM was busy with a big lawsuit because they had so dominated the mainframe business. When they finally got through with that, they wanted to get into these microcomputers. By the way, we had...when the minicomputer came along at one-tenth the cost of the mainframe, it put all but IBM out of the mainframe business. They hung on. But the minicomputers...what was it? I'll think of the name anyway...What was the big one? Olsen, DEC, Digital Equipment, and so forth.<br />
<br />
I sat down and had lunch with Olsen. I said, "You've got to start adopting these microcomputers." He said, "Oh, they're just toys. We're not going to be bothered with that." I went over to Data General, which was another big one, and sat down with the president there. He said the same thing, "We're not going to be bothered with that," and on and on.<br />
<br />
I talked to all of the top people in the minicomputer business. Of course, about two or three years later they're all out of business. The microcomputers just dominated everything at one-tenth the cost of a minicomputer. Anytime technology comes along that is one-tenth the cost, it's going to dominate. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: At what point did you realize that computing was going to move from the realm of hobbyist to an actual thing that everyone...?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I don't think there was any time. It just happens. I didn't think about that. I was just busy keeping up, keeping ahead, actually. [laughs] Then Computerworld came along. I got to know Pat McGovern, the head at Computerworld, met him at a conference and so forth. They wanted to buy my magazines and I said, "Well, I've done that. I'll move on." They bought them.<br />
<br />
They didn't put anybody... I think his people got irritated at him making the decision on that. They put not very bright people at the head of each project and all the magazines died.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How many magazines did you sell at that point? Do you know?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I think about five. You have to have somebody who sees the future and gets there first, which I have always done. With compact discs, I noticed that there were six companies making almost 96 percent of all the compact discs, only one of them American the other five were European. I said this is crazy, we've got all these independents out here and they only have four percent of the market.<br />
<br />
We got a group of people to check each CD that an independent put out and tell me what the best cut was on that and I put out samples discs, CDs with 15 different independent samples on it and gave them away totally free except for shipping and handling which paid for everything [laughs] and sold millions of those and the result was that the independent sales went from four percent to 16 percent of the market, over a billion dollars more to them and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You had this advertisement for the indy CD in your magazine?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah. I put out a special journal for the independents of course [laughs] and a special catalog et cetera.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When did you get out of the CD magazine industry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: When it matured. I was never in it as a business, just wanted to make it work. I sold it to IDG where it died, that's the same people that bought my computer magazines. [laughs] But we've got a lot of things we need to change in this country and I've got some good proposals for it.<br />
<br />
The federal government is incredibly bloated, have some over two million people working for the federal government and hiring more all the time. I know how we can cut the government in half in three years, with everybody involved, enthusiastically cooperating. How's that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sounds good!<br />
<br />
Wayne: We've got these stupid wars. We haven't won a war since World War II. We keep getting into them for political reasons and not winning. Like, the Vietnam War, what did we lose, 55,000 Americans over there doing that? You've got nothing.<br />
<br />
We're not getting anything much out of Afghanistan or Iraq now. The only reason we went there was this 9/11 thing which turns out to have been totally fudged. I have a way we can get out of there successfully and win, easily and quickly at almost no expense.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I've looked at your blog and I've read many of your opinions. You seem like an opinionated person, you don't keep them to yourself.<br />
<br />
Wayne: I do my research and I pride myself of not having any beliefs, because a belief prevents you from re-thinking things, or accepting new data. I say "What is the data, what are the facts?" the best I can find them. I have 54 bookshelves full of books that I've read, doing the research, and very, very few novels. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think, for the moment, I'm going to say, I'm...<br />
<br />
Wayne: This is, this is...<br />
<br />
Kevin: I have... That's all the questions that I have for now. I need to assess what we've talked about and see where I have follow up.<br />
<br />
Wayne: This was a long 15 minutes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs] Sorry.<br />
<br />
Wayne: The beard is new, I just grew that just for the hell of it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Looks good. I have mine because my wife went out of town for like a week once, and I just stopped shaving because I'm lazy. She came back, and she said OK, that can stay.<br />
<br />
Wayne: [laughs] Well, I thought I'd see what it grew into.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
Wayne: I [indecipherable 57:21] so I can be Santa Claus.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Well thank you for your time.<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK. Well, as you can tell, I hate talking, and it has to be pried out of me. [laughs] Have fun with your book.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Thanks.<br />
<br />
Wayne: I get a free copy, don't I?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Absolutely, yeah.<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: All right, thanks Wayne.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right-O.</div>Mauryhttps://www.computingpioneers.com/index.php?title=Wayne_Green&diff=193Wayne Green2021-10-19T23:56:31Z<p>Maury: </p>
<hr />
<div>This is a transcript of an audio interview. This transcript may contain errors - if you're using this material for research, etc. please verify with the original recorded interview.<br />
<br />
Source: Floppy Days vintage computing podcast<br />
<br />
Source URL: http://floppydays.libsyn.com/floppy-days-48-kevin-savetz-interviews-wayne-green and https://archive.org/details/WayneGreenInterview<br />
<br />
Interviewer: Kevin Savetz<br />
<br />
Wayne Green was founder of 73 magazine; Byte magazine; Kilobyte, which became Kilobaud, then Kilobaud Microcomputing; 80 Micro magazine for the TRS-80; Hot Coco for the TRS-80 Color Computer; Run for the Commodore 64, inCider magazine for the Apple II; and several other computer magazines. <br />
<br />
This interview took place over Skype on January 29, 2013, when Kevin was doing research for a book about the very first personal computer magazines — Byte, Kilobyte, and Creative Computing. Although he decided not to write the book, he is publishing the interviews. Wayne Green died on September 13, 2013, eight months after this interview.<br />
<br />
----<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wikipedia, which is never wrong, [sarcastically] says you were born in 1922. Is that right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yep. Why sure!<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yep. Why sure! That's New Hampshire for yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was my next question. It says you live in Hancock, New Hampshire.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yep.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Mostly I want to start talking about "Kilobaud," but before we get there, the first magazine you published was "73", is that right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well the first magazine, yeah. I published an extended news journal before that that got to 64 pages and had 2000 subscribers, called "Amateur Radio Frontiers." Then in 1960 I started "73 Magazine" for amateur radio and published that for 43 years. It was always about new HAM technologies.<br />
<br />
This is fun, this is fun, let's do this, let's do this, and so forth and then I ran out of them and I said, "Well, it was never about making money," although it did make a good deal of money, but I've never done anything saying "Hey I can make money." It's always "Someone needs to do this." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent! 73...you stopped at what year?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Two double-O, three.<br />
<br />
Kevin: 2003, OK. You started with that, had you any magazine publishing experience before that?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well just that Amateur Radio Frontiers that's all, and oh, yes, when I did Amateur Radio Frontiers, it started out about radio teletype, M teletype, and that got me a column in "CQ Magazine" one of the 2 HAM magazines, and then I got the editor a better job, he wasn't a HAM, I got him a better job with a new magazine that was starting and they hired me on as editor for five years and I did very nicely, had a wonderful time there so I learned all about publishing.<br />
<br />
Then the publisher, who is not a HAM either, bought a yacht, got overextended and got a year behind on paying my salary, so he fired me. I said, "Well, this is so much fun." I had just enough money to publish the first issue of "73." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wow.<br />
<br />
Wayne: That's how I got into that, but yes, I had experience with publishing with CQ. I knew the advertisers, they knew me, the readers knew me, and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was "Byte" your idea, or how did you get moved from HAM radio into computing?<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK, well, I kept getting more and more articles for 73 on computers by computer hobbyists that were tied in with HAM radio. Then one of my advertisers, MITS, Micro Instrument Telemetry Service, had been advertising with me. They put out a $129 four-banger calculator, adding machine, a little adding pad and so forth.<br />
<br />
All of a sudden, one of the Japanese companies came out with one for about $20, [laughs] and put him out of business. He had been making computers as a hobby, so he put together the Altair 8800 using the 8080 chip from Intel, and put it on the market, and I read about that, and I said, "Ah-hah. I think this is going to be..."<br />
<br />
I thought up a short name for a magazine in the field, and I came up with "Byte," which I thought was right on mark. [laughs] I wrote to all of the companies that were making equipment that the hobbyists were using, and said, "Please send me your mailing lists, the people who have asked for information or that have bought from you." I kept getting shoeboxes full of these names and addresses, and I sent them out, and I was getting a 20 percent response. Now on direct mail, one percent is good. [laughs] I started publishing Byte Magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You wrote to these companies saying, please send me the list of people interested in your products...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right.<br />
<br />
Kevin: ...and then you mailed them about Byte Magazine?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is that right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Now, unfortunately, at that time, I had trouble with the IRS. One of my ad salesmen for 73 made a big mistake and offered a free ad to people who would start advertising with us. Well, immediately my competition told everybody about that and everybody that was advertising wanted a free ad. I had to fire the guy.<br />
<br />
Well he got even by telling the IRS that I was hiding money and the IRS came in and made life miserable. They came in and said, OK all this furniture in your office here that's a personal expense not a business expense, and you've had it for five or seven years so therefore you owe so much a year on that. Oh, this big camera that you're using for your photography, that's a two thousand dollar expense that was personal.<br />
<br />
They did one thing after another and built it up to where I owed about twenty thousand dollars and [laughs] took me to court. [laughs] At any rate, when I started the new magazine the lawyer said, well you better put it in somebody else's name for the time being. I had gotten back together with my first wife, who is now an ex-wife, and we had split up ten years before, and we got back together, and so I put it in her name, big mistake.<br />
<br />
After five issues, the magazine was going great guns and I came back from giving a talk one night and the magazine was gone, everything. All the files [laughs] , everything, was gone.<br />
<br />
Kevin: We're talking file cabinets, and pages laid out, and everything was just...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Everything got moved out, all the back issues and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you think you were robbed? What was your initial thought?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I knew right away what happened. I tried to get in touch with her. She said, "Oh, yes. We took the magazine."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Why do you think that happened? Why did she do that?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Because it was worth a lot of money. She published it for a few issues and then sold it to McGraw-Hill for $7 million dollars. Within a year or so it was billing over $1 million a month in ad sales and it got up to 800 pages a month, magazine. In the meantime I started to put out a magazine called "Kilobyte." and they threatened to sue, so I made it "Kilobaud." Then I put out one called "Desktop Computing", which was in plain English, not computerese, for business men.<br />
<br />
When Apple came out with their... well first I started with the Radio Shack computer, which was the biggest seller. They had 20 percent of the market with their TRS-80. I put out an "80 Micro" magazine. That got to be the third largest magazine in the country at 500 pages a month. [laughs] The reason Radio Shack got into this is because when I first got started with Byte I took the first issue with me down to MITS in Albuquerque.<br />
<br />
Then I stopped off in Fort Worth, Texas and visited an advertiser of mine in 73 who had a radio store there and showed him. I said this is going to be the big future. At any rate, then I went down to San Antonio where they were putting out a keyboard. I got an 8800 computer from MITS, the keyboard from the other place, and I made it work, and I said, "That's it, this is going to be great."<br />
<br />
I started "Byte Magazine," and at any rate the chap that I talked to in Fort Worth closed his store, went to work for Radio Shack, and the next thing I know they had a factory down there making TRS80's, and he was the head of it.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: That's a good gig.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right. But that got to be, as I said 20 percent of the market, and a couple of hundred small companies in there. I put out the magazine for that, and then I put out one for the color computer, called "Hot Cocoa." I put out another one called "Run."<br />
<br />
Kevin: For the Commodore, right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I put out one for the Apple, and I put out one for dealers called Selling Micros, and so forth and I covered the field pretty well. There was a big need for software, so I started Instant Software Company, and I brought a local motel that had 12 offices for me instead of rooms. I took the center part where they had a big restaurant, and made that into a computer lab and got a bunch of computers, and hired on a lot of programmers.<br />
<br />
What I did was have the readers, send in any program that they made, and we would market it for them. Pretty soon, I had a couple of hundred programs on there. I had all kinds, business programs, educational programs, entertainment programs and so forth, and we were the largest software dealer there, in the industry for a while. Anyway, I kept going with that, and finally I said, "Well, done that, [chuckles] done that."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Seems like for a while, you must have had many employees, filling up your 12 offices. How big was your empire?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I had over 250. When I brought the building next door to mine...My building wasn't bad, 40 rooms. The one next door was a little smaller, and then bought the motel, and another building up in North Peterborough for the books that we were putting out, and we put out a lot of books. We had a shipping department out in West Peterborough. [laughs] I don't know I'm like that, we grew and grew.<br />
<br />
Finally, I said, "Well I've done that, and I want to move on." Compact disks have come out, and the industry is ignoring them. The Music Magazines, Hi-Fi Magazines won't have anything to do with them, they say, "Well, we're always going to have LP's, so we don't need a new medium", and I said, "Boloney." First, I sold all my computer magazines to computer world, and got 16 million dollars for that to work with.<br />
<br />
I then started a "CD" review magazine, which within the year, became the largest music magazine, and "CD's" were in. [laughs] I built a studio, I got interested in ragtime. I went to see the movie "The Sting," and they had...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Scott Joplin.<br />
<br />
Wayne: ...this Scott Joplin music there, and I said "Wow, where have I been? How did I miss this?" I'd always been a classical music fan since I was seven years old and was first exposed to it. It was an instant take on classical.<br />
<br />
I was down in New Orleans at a music conference and I was walking along the street with my wife and I heard Scott Joplin music coming out of this bar. I'd been very disappointed, I'd bought every LP I could find on Scott Joplin, and the performers were all mechanical. They didn't feel the music, and I felt it. This guy, Scott Kirby, felt it. I went in and we sat down and had a couple Cokes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: This Scott Kirby guy is playing live in the venue?<br />
<br />
Wayne: He was playing in this bar, and I brought him to New Hampshire and we made a CD of Scott Joplin music and the result was so spectacular that I built us a $100,000 studio, one of the real state-of-the-art. No two walls parallel anywhere, and one wall all mirrors on hinges, with sponge spikes behind. You could vary the liveliness of the room however you wanted it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Bought a huge grand piano and so forth, and like that, so anyway, we put out a whole bunch of CD's.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Hold on a second. [pause] Sorry.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well anyway, that's how computers got started. That was the start of the whole industry was because there was computer hobbyist groups. That's who I was catering to with "Byte" to start with.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I want to go back to a couple of things. First of all, you said you sold all your magazines to Computer World.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You just felt done?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They were humming along. They're probably doing pretty well.<br />
<br />
Wayne: They were doing very well, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You were just bored with it?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah, I had to move on. Yes. Just like with 73, when I ran out of new things, I closed it. With computers, I ran out of new things. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Going back even farther, when your ex-wife took the magazine from you, how did you feel? Did you feel betrayed, or was it just like an opportunity?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, sure. I sued her a little bit and settled for $100,000, which she never paid. That's what it cost me to start it. No big deal. I've never worried about money, never fussed about it. It's not important to me. Getting things done, sharing, is the big deal for me. When I find something fun, interesting, I have to share it. And that's what gets the magazines started and so forth.<br />
<br />
After CDs, I got that going. Then I sold that magazine. The next interest was Cold Fusion. I'd heard about it, and I heard more and more as I investigated. And I went out to a Cold Fusion conference out in...<br />
<br />
Kevin: What year are we talking here?<br />
<br />
Wayne: 1993. I went out to a cold fusion conference on Maui, in the Hawaiian Islands. I went there a little early so I could scuba dive all six islands. As a result of going to that, I decided to start "Cold Fusion" magazine. I hired on Gene Mallove as the editor. He had worked for MIT in their publications department. MIT was one of the early places where they tested cold fusion. They sent out a report saying it didn't work.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was this the nuclear reaction in a coffee cup thing that was...am I thinking of the right thing?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah. I can give you a simple explanation of it. But anyway, Mallove looked into it and he said, "Hey, you fudged these figures." They said, "Shut up. We're getting millions for hot fusion research. Shut the hell up," so he quit. I met him at the conference and hired him on to edit the magazine.<br />
<br />
The magazine took off. Of course, when we got ready to print the fourth issue, I came into the office one day and everything was gone. Everything was cleaned out. He moved up to Maine and put out his own magazine there using all my magazine articles that had been submitted and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: This had to seem familiar?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yes, right. I hired a guy from Vermont who was an expert, but he was in lunatic asylum. I got him out and hired him on. We put out the magazine in reduced form for 28 issues. We published all the scientific papers by the top physicists on exactly how and why this works. Jim Patterson, an inventor down in Sarasota, Florida, demonstrated a cold fusion cell at an energy conference.<br />
<br />
It was about the size of a coffee mug. He had one watt of electricity going in and 1,000 watts of heat coming out for the length of this show. What you do is you take powdered nickel and put it in water. Then you pass electric currents through the water which separates it into hydrogen and oxygen, OK, you with me?<br />
<br />
The hydrogen is absorbed by the nickel which is like a sponge. The Oxygen molecule is too big, and it passes off. Of course, you use the powder so you have the maximum surface area on the Carbon. Pardon me, on the Nickel.<br />
<br />
When it gets 82 percent full of Hydrogen, it begins to combine with the Nickel to make Copper which is the next one up on the Scale of Atomic Weight. There's 0.2 mass left over, that's gone. If you look at Albert Einstein's e=mc^2. Energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light. A tiny but of mass lost is equal to a huge amount of energy which comes off as heat.<br />
<br />
When you get it up to 82 percent it begins generating heat and will generate a lot of heat. What I look forward to is a unit in every building's basement that generates all the heat and the electricity that you can use for almost nothing, less than a thousandth the cost of oil. It uses very little Nickel to generate an awful lot of energy.<br />
<br />
The Department of Energy, no doubt urged by the Oil Industry, and at that time the Bush's were President. They were oil people from way back. The Department of Energy sent out a message to all the colleges and universities, "If you do any research on Cold Fusion on an undergraduate level you get no more money from the government for anything." Then they went to the Patent Office and said, "You're not to even look at patent applications for Cold Fusion."<br />
<br />
Then the head of the Department of Energy put out a book, Zenga, called "Cold Fusion, the Fiasco of the Century." They buried it. There's some science that it's being re-interred if you look at E-cat. Looks like Andrea Rossi may be getting going with it. It is the future, it is the way things are going to go. It has to.<br />
<br />
It's one of three technologies that are going to totally change the world, totally. Not one, the next one is the Takahashi capacitor. If you're into electronics think of a capacitor one inch square, about an eighth of an inch thick that has one farad of capacity.<br />
<br />
Now, we all deal with millions of farad in all of our electronics. I drove scooter all over outer London one day, all day... powered by one of these capacitors, call it a battery, if you will. It was half the size of a Coca-Cola can. We're talking about a battery for cars or any vehicle about the size of a shoebox that will power a car for 500 miles, recharge in a few seconds, and of course your cold fusion is nonpolluting in any way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What's the third item?<br />
<br />
Wayne: The third item, a book came out by Dr. Bruno Comby called Maximize Immunity. He said, "Look, in every research project with dogs, cats, rats, mice and so forth, those fed the standard American diet were getting cancer, heart disease, and other human ailments and those fed raw food weren't. The ones on the American diet were living only half as long."<br />
<br />
They tried some rats and they took three groups of them. One fed raw food. The second fed the American diet. When they got to the age of 60, human age of 60, they did an autopsy to find out how they were.<br />
<br />
The ones on raw food were in perfect shape in every way. Those that survived on the human diet were in terrible shape. Their teeth were bad. Their guts were bad and so forth.<br />
<br />
The third group they put on the American diet with cooked food and when they got to be 30 years old, in the human context, they took them off that diet and put them on raw food. Those that survived that long they autopsied when they got to be the equivalent of 60 and all back in perfect shape again.<br />
<br />
Dr. Bruno Comby, not being real stupid, his hospital in Paris, Institute Comby and you can go to comby.com, Institute Comby. Put his patients on raw food diets and he said he was unable to find any incurable [chime] illnesses, none. Then, a few weeks after reading this, I heard Dr. Lorrain Day on the Art Bell show and she is or was a trauma surgeon in San Francisco and taught in hospitals.<br />
<br />
She got a breast cancer and you go to drday.com and you'll see that breast cancer. She knew that chemotherapy made everybody terribly sick and didn't save any lives, about 97 percent deaths on it. She didn't go that route. It got down to where the cancer went all through her body, and they gave her days to live, gave her last rites, and then she changed to a raw food diet, and total cure.<br />
<br />
Since then, she says she has found no incurable illnesses when you do this. There's a DVD out now, "Rawfor30 Days.com," which shows a group of people with long-term diabetes going on a 30-day raw food regime. At the end of 30 days, they were all totally cured of diabetes...all of them, type two diabetes.<br />
<br />
I said, "OK," and I wrote a book for Americans, since Bruno Comby is French. He did get an American translation. A fellow up in Canada did that for him. But he only had a limited printing of it, so I wrote my book, which went into all that with a lot more details on fluoride and the dangers of that, and so forth.<br />
<br />
That is where we stand, and that's the third one. If the word gets around on that, it's going to put the pharmaceutical industry out of business. That is our most profitable industry in the country. The top 10 pharmaceutical companies make more profits than the other 390 companies on the Forbes 400 list combined. We're talking $3 trillion if you get sick, and nothing if you get healthy...so there's no money in health. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Why don't we get back to...<br />
<br />
Wayne: That's the three. Oh, get back to computers.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Computer magazines.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Serves you right.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sorry. [laughs] You're writing a book about health. I'm writing a book about computer magazines.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well, I knew all the beginners.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sorry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I knew everybody in the field at the beginning.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah? Tell me interesting people you met.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, I don't know. Let's see... well Bill Godbout. He put out Godbout computers for a while.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You went to a lot of conferences, early computer conferences, I assume?<br />
<br />
Wayne: How about Steve Jobs? Maybe you read my thing on that, where I heard about the Apple computer, so my wife and I stopped by to visit him. Took me out...well, first he called Steve Wozniak over, who designed and built the Apple I.<br />
<br />
They took me out to the garage and showed it to me and he said, "What do you think?" I said, "I think you've got a winner." I said, "Up 'til now, all of our computers had a motherboard. You plugged in the processor. You plugged in the memory. You plugged in the communication. You plugged in the keyboard." I said, "You've got it all on one board. That's the way to go."<br />
<br />
Jobs said, "Well, what'll we do?" I said, "Well, there's a first computer conference that's going to be in Atlantic City in two weeks. Be there." He said, "Oh, I can't afford to fly." I said, "Take a bus. Be there." I had my booth there for the magazine and right opposite of me was the Apple booth with Steve Jobs. At the end of show he came over he said, "Wayne! Wayne! I'm in business! I've got 12 orders!" [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent. What was the conference? What was it called?<br />
<br />
Wayne: It was a computer conference for microcomputers. Then a year later I stopped by to visit him and he had a laboratory at that time and I talked with him for a while. I said, "Well, you've got the Apple II here. How are you going to market that?"<br />
<br />
He said, "Well I'm going to sell it direct like we've been doing the Apple I." I said, "Well, we've got some computer stores now. Why don't you sell it through those?" "Oh, they'd take a discount. No, we're not going to do that."<br />
<br />
I said, "Alright, here's what you do first thing Steve, first thing. Hire a marketing manager." He hired a marketing manager, Mark Hula and learned it [laughs] and they sold through stores. The result was a very successful company.<br />
<br />
If I'd been able to get through the wall around Steve Jobs, he'd still be alive. I think he had pancreatic cancer. It's so easy to cure if you change to raw food. I'm 90 doing raw food.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I'm 90 years old and doing raw food. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Seems to be working for you. You had your editorial team, how does a typical issue go together?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, of which? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Let's go with Microcomputing.<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Assuming Kilobaud...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well, whatever. Anyway, the articles would come in and I had an editor for each and we invested in a computer system for setting type. At first you had to set type with linotype and all that stuff in the early days and then finally got computerized. I was right at the beginning of all of those, one of the first adopters.<br />
<br />
I had a whole team of them in my 40 room house there, what had been a bowling alley part of the house we did for production and so forth. We all produced there. Then I added the other buildings, the one next door for the color computer and so forth.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I kept adding more buildings. The books came out of north Peterborough and we put out quite of few books there of software and other things.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Type in software books?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there ever any other negative feedback from advertisers who didn't like how a review came out or wanted things to be written a certain way?<br />
<br />
Wayne: No. I don't recall ever having trouble with advertisers in any way, no. They loved the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Talk about the typical reader of Kilobaud. Was it more of a hobbyist market than some other magazines?<br />
<br />
Wayne: It was all hobby at that time because you had computer clubs around the country and that was what it was.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you read computer magazines today?<br />
<br />
Wayne: No, done that. That's a "Been there, done that," same thing with amateur radio. Without new technologies I lost interest in that. I got interested in that...Well it first started when I was 12 and I went to church one day, to Sunday school. A fellow came in with a box of radio parts and asked my friend Alfie if he was interested and Alfie said, "No." "What about you Wayne?" I said, "You bet!"<br />
<br />
I took them home and there was an article in Popular Mechanics on building a cigar box radio. I had the parts so I built it and I was trapped for life. [laughs] I went into business selling postage stamps to make money for radio parts, always the entrepreneur, I'd buy 50 pound sacks of stamps torn off envelopes and then sell them in five pound lots and did a brisk business with that with ads in the stamp magazines.<br />
<br />
Anyway, that bought me the radio parts. Then I went to high school and they had a radio club and I went there, that's where I learned about amateur radio. Then the next thing you know I got my HAM radio license.<br />
<br />
Again, the forefront in amateur radio at that time was the microwave stuff and VHF. What did I do? I built a little two and half meter walkie-talkie and that was the first rig that I went on the air with when I got my HAM license, walking around town talking to friends on two and a half meters.<br />
<br />
Then of course the war came along so they closed down the HAM bands. I was going to college. I was in my second year at college by that time. I joined the Navy one day before the draft board got me.<br />
<br />
They were yanking me right out of college, so I made a good deal with the Navy on that. The fellow who worked for my dad...My dad was in aviation. He started the first transatlantic airline, American Export Airlines.<br />
<br />
One of the fellows that worked for him was in the reserves and got called back in when the war started and he put me in touch with a fellow who was running the lab, the electronics lab over in Virginia across the river from Washington DC. I went down and visited him, Commander Bourne and he said, "Wow! I want you on my staff."<br />
<br />
I joined the Navy and he said, "Now first we're going to send you to radio school, or electronic school in the Navy here for nine months and then we'll get going here. Let me know when you're out so I can do the papers to get you back here." I went to the electronic school, Radio Material School, graduated on top, number one. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Well I had been a C student all my life. At any rate, when I graduated I had a choice of getting in touch with Commander Bourne and going back to the lab. I said, "No. I'm more dispensable. Let's leave that for somebody with a wife and kids or something."<br />
<br />
I volunteered for submarine duty which was the most dangerous of all, they had the highest loss of any branch of the service because everybody that was in the submarines was on a submarine. They didn't have a large land support. The next thing you know I'm on a submarine, USS Drum, spent five war patrols on that and I've written a book on my adventures there and we were one of the top scoring boats.<br />
<br />
The boat is on display down in Alabama. At Mobile Alabama it's on display there and you can see pictures that I took 70 years ago of the crew and me, [laughs] and so forth. We had some very, very close escapes. I saved the boat personally twice with my fast action.<br />
<br />
I was the radar operator and of course when we were submerged I was on the sonar. Anyway, there's a lot of interesting stories there. After the war I got back into college again and became president of the radio club and I said, "Well golly. We need a radio station here." I started a wire broadcasting station.<br />
<br />
I went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute up in Troy, New York. I started WRPI and we did all kinds of interesting news and shows, plays and so forth, and brought girls in from the local girls' college for the girls' parts. Today, that is the largest student activity, is that radio station which is now an FM station.<br />
<br />
After I got out of college I went to work first for a radio station down in North Carolina. I got fed up with that and had an opportunity. The fellow who introduced me to classical music when I was seven had done an article on my dad's airport. My dad was hired to design and build and operate an airport for Philadelphia.<br />
<br />
He had done a survey for the Department of Commerce on all the airports around the country. He built the first concrete paved runway central airport there. He managed that until he quit and went to work for one of the first airlines, Ludington Airlines, which is owned by Tommy Ludington and Amelia Earhart. Amelia Earhart kept her plane at my dad's airport, the Lockheed, and I used to play in that when I was a kid. He had her over to dinner a number of times. I got to know her.<br />
<br />
I'm one of the few people that knows exactly what happened to her. Her mechanic was a good friend of my dad's. As a matter of fact, you can find on the Web where my dad is in the plane with Don Whemple when he married Ms. Philadelphia. They did it all in the air [laughs] with my dad being there. That made the... I found that on the Web. At any rate... on and on. [laughs] I'll do a book someday...<br />
<br />
Kevin: You should.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Volume one of 10.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well, anyway, that's how computers got started. Before that I did cell phones the same way. I was publishing the HAM magazine and a few HAM clubs put automatic repeaters or relays on top of mountains and tall buildings to extend the range of handy-talkies and mobiles. I said, "Wow, this is fun." I put one up on the local mountain, and it made it so that any mobile HAM anywhere in New England could talk to any other.<br />
<br />
I had a lot of fun with that and I had my little handy-talkie, talking through it and so forth. I put a bridge to 10 meters so they could talk all around the world there, if they wanted. I published hundreds of articles on repeaters, and a group out in Chicago put their repeater up on the top of the tallest building there, the Sears Tower, and had little receivers all spread around the outskirts of Chicago to pick up the mobile units and the handy-talkies and relay it through the Tower.<br />
<br />
I kept writing in my editorial and said, "Look, I'm able to ski the mountains of New Hampshire, Vermont, and Colorado, and Utah, and make telephone calls anywhere in the world through the local HAM repeater." I said, "Everybody's going to want to do this." Well, Art Householder, K9TRG, out in Chicago, was working for Motorola, and he took my editorials to the top people at Motorola, and he said, "Here," and that's where cell phones started. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Awesome.<br />
<br />
Wayne: But when I started, there were about half-a-dozen clubs with repeaters. By the time I got through publishing articles and a handbook and a list and so forth, there were over 8,000 repeaters around the country in the HAM clubs. I was flying from Johannesburg, South Africa... I was publishing with some computer magazines there, they invited me down.<br />
<br />
I said, "Well, I'll come down if you also include a trip to Swaziland and Lesotho", and they said, "Done." I was flying in a plane they hired for me from South Africa up to Mbanane in Swaziland. I was talking to the HAMs all around South Africa from the plane by way of the repeaters, and all of a sudden the Swaziland repeater came on, and I said, "That's it - we're everywhere." [laughs] Anyway, that's how cell phones got started.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Then, of course, when computers came along, I said, "I think I can...again." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: When you were starting the computer magazines, there was clubs. Were there other computer magazines that you started basing Byte and Kilobaud on? I don't know exactly the timeline of them, what came when, so...but you feel like you were the first.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, I was the first at it. By the time Radio Shack was big, they were going in everywhere. It was getting very popular. They were selling well. [laughs] The programs were coming on, making it so that you could write letters and send email and stuff like that, and the web was developing.<br />
<br />
Bill Gates, I met him first at MITS, when they had the first anniversary of their putting out their Altair 8800. They had a party, and I attended that, and we got asked, "Well, now, what do we do with these things?" The best that anybody could come up with was, "Well, you can use it to program the lawn watering." [laughs] That's all they could think of to do with them at that time. [laughs]<br />
<br />
But anyway, right a few days after Bill Gates started working there, he came in. I think he went to school at Harvard. As a part of a computer class, he did a program in BASIC. When the 8800 came out, there was no software for it at all, nothing, just some little switches on the front. He went down there with his BASIC, and they hired him on.<br />
<br />
IBM was busy with a big lawsuit because they had so dominated the mainframe business. When they finally got through with that, they wanted to get into these microcomputers. By the way, we had...when the minicomputer came along at one-tenth the cost of the mainframe, it put all but IBM out of the mainframe business. They hung on. But the minicomputers...what was it? I'll think of the name anyway...What was the big one? Olsen, DEC, Digital Equipment, and so forth.<br />
<br />
I sat down and had lunch with Olsen. I said, "You've got to start adopting these microcomputers." He said, "Oh, they're just toys. We're not going to be bothered with that." I went over to Data General, which was another big one, and sat down with the president there. He said the same thing, "We're not going to be bothered with that," and on and on.<br />
<br />
I talked to all of the top people in the minicomputer business. Of course, about two or three years later they're all out of business. The microcomputers just dominated everything at one-tenth the cost of a minicomputer. Anytime technology comes along that is one-tenth the cost, it's going to dominate. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: At what point did you realize that computing was going to move from the realm of hobbyist to an actual thing that everyone...?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I don't think there was any time. It just happens. I didn't think about that. I was just busy keeping up, keeping ahead, actually. [laughs] Then Computerworld came along. I got to know Pat McGovern, the head at Computerworld, met him at a conference and so forth. They wanted to buy my magazines and I said, "Well, I've done that. I'll move on." They bought them.<br />
<br />
They didn't put anybody... I think his people got irritated at him making the decision on that. They put not very bright people at the head of each project and all the magazines died.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How many magazines did you sell at that point? Do you know?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I think about five. You have to have somebody who sees the future and gets there first, which I have always done. With compact discs, I noticed that there were six companies making almost 96 percent of all the compact discs, only one of them American the other five were European. I said this is crazy, we've got all these independents out here and they only have four percent of the market.<br />
<br />
We got a group of people to check each CD that an independent put out and tell me what the best cut was on that and I put out samples discs, CDs with 15 different independent samples on it and gave them away totally free except for shipping and handling which paid for everything [laughs] and sold millions of those and the result was that the independent sales went from four percent to 16 percent of the market, over a billion dollars more to them and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You had this advertisement for the indy CD in your magazine?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah. I put out a special journal for the independents of course [laughs] and a special catalog et cetera.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When did you get out of the CD magazine industry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: When it matured. I was never in it as a business, just wanted to make it work. I sold it to IDG where it died, that's the same people that bought my computer magazines. [laughs] But we've got a lot of things we need to change in this country and I've got some good proposals for it.<br />
<br />
The federal government is incredibly bloated, have some over two million people working for the federal government and hiring more all the time. I know how we can cut the government in half in three years, with everybody involved, enthusiastically cooperating. How's that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sounds good!<br />
<br />
Wayne: We've got these stupid wars. We haven't won a war since World War II. We keep getting into them for political reasons and not winning. Like, the Vietnam War, what did we lose, 55,000 Americans over there doing that? You've got nothing.<br />
<br />
We're not getting anything much out of Afghanistan or Iraq now. The only reason we went there was this 9/11 thing which turns out to have been totally fudged. I have a way we can get out of there successfully and win, easily and quickly at almost no expense.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I've looked at your blog and I've read many of your opinions. You seem like an opinionated person, you don't keep them to yourself.<br />
<br />
Wayne: I do my research and I pride myself of not having any beliefs, because a belief prevents you from re-thinking things, or accepting new data. I say "What is the data, what are the facts?" the best I can find them. I have 54 bookshelves full of books that I've read, doing the research, and very, very few novels. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think, for the moment, I'm going to say, I'm...<br />
<br />
Wayne: This is, this is...<br />
<br />
Kevin: I have... That's all the questions that I have for now. I need to assess what we've talked about and see where I have follow up.<br />
<br />
Wayne: This was a long 15 minutes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs] Sorry.<br />
<br />
Wayne: The beard is new, I just grew that just for the hell of it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Looks good. I have mine because my wife went out of town for like a week once, and I just stopped shaving because I'm lazy. She came back, and she said OK, that can stay.<br />
<br />
Wayne: [laughs] Well, I thought I'd see what it grew into.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
Wayne: I [indecipherable 57:21] so I can be Santa Claus.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Well thank you for your time.<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK. Well, as you can tell, I hate talking, and it has to be pried out of me. [laughs] Have fun with your book.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Thanks.<br />
<br />
Wayne: I get a free copy, don't I?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Absolutely, yeah.<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: All right, thanks Wayne.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right-O.</div>Mauryhttps://www.computingpioneers.com/index.php?title=Wayne_Green&diff=192Wayne Green2021-10-19T23:43:20Z<p>Maury: </p>
<hr />
<div>This is a transcript of an audio interview. This transcript may contain errors - if you're using this material for research, etc. please verify with the original recorded interview.<br />
<br />
Source: Floppy Days vintage computing podcast<br />
<br />
Source URL: http://floppydays.libsyn.com/floppy-days-48-kevin-savetz-interviews-wayne-green and https://archive.org/details/WayneGreenInterview<br />
<br />
Interviewer: Kevin Savetz<br />
<br />
Wayne Green was founder of 73 magazine; Byte magazine; Kilobyte, which became Kilobaud, then Kilobaud Microcomputing; 80 Micro magazine for the TRS-80; Hot Coco for the TRS-80 Color Computer; Run for the Commodore 64, inCider magazine for the Apple II; and several other computer magazines. <br />
<br />
This interview took place over Skype on January 29, 2013, when Kevin was doing research for a book about the very first personal computer magazines — Byte, Kilobyte, and Creative Computing. Although he decided not to write the book, he is publishing the interviews. Wayne Green died on September 13, 2013, eight months after this interview.<br />
<br />
----<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wikipedia, which is never wrong, [sarcastically] says you were born in 1922. Is that right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yep. Why sure!<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yep. Why sure! That's New Hampshire for yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was my next question. It says you live in Hancock, New Hampshire.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yep.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Mostly I want to start talking about "Kilobaud," but before we get there, the first magazine you published was "73", is that right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well the first magazine, yeah. I published an extended news journal before that that got to 64 pages and had 2000 subscribers, called "Amateur Radio Frontiers." Then in 1960 I started "73 Magazine" for amateur radio and published that for 43 years. It was always about new HAM technologies.<br />
<br />
This is fun, this is fun, let's do this, let's do this, and so forth and then I ran out of them and I said, "Well, it was never about making money," although it did make a good deal of money, but I've never done anything saying "Hey I can make money." It's always "Someone needs to do this." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent! 73...you stopped at what year?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Two double-O, three.<br />
<br />
Kevin: 2003, OK. You started with that, had you any magazine publishing experience before that?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well just that Amateur Radio Frontiers that's all, and oh, yes, when I did Amateur Radio Frontiers, it started out about radio teletype, M teletype, and that got me a column in "CQ Magazine" one of the 2 HAM magazines, and then I got the editor a better job, he wasn't a HAM, I got him a better job with a new magazine that was starting and they hired me on as editor for five years and I did very nicely, had a wonderful time there so I learned all about publishing.<br />
<br />
Then the publisher, who is not a HAM either, bought a yacht, got overextended and got a year behind on paying my salary, so he fired me. I said, "Well, this is so much fun." I had just enough money to publish the first issue of "73." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wow.<br />
<br />
Wayne: That's how I got into that, but yes, I had experience with publishing with CQ. I knew the advertisers, they knew me, the readers knew me, and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was "Byte" your idea, or how did you get moved from HAM radio into computing?<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK, well, I kept getting more and more articles for 73 on computers by computer hobbyists that were tied in with HAM radio. Then one of my advertisers, MITS, Micro Instrument Telemetry Service, had been advertising with me. They put out a $129 four-banger calculator, adding machine, a little adding pad and so forth.<br />
<br />
All of a sudden, one of the Japanese companies came out with one for about $20, [laughs] and put him out of business. He had been making computers as a hobby, so he put together the Altair 8800 using the 8080 chip from Intel, and put it on the market, and I read about that, and I said, "Ah-hah. I think this is going to be..."<br />
<br />
I thought up a short name for a magazine in the field, and I came up with "Byte," which I thought was right on mark. [laughs] I wrote to all of the companies that were making equipment that the hobbyists were using, and said, "Please send me your mailing lists, the people who have asked for information or that have bought from you." I kept getting shoeboxes full of these names and addresses, and I sent them out, and I was getting a 20 percent response. Now on direct mail, one percent is good. [laughs] I started publishing Byte Magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You wrote to these companies saying, please send me the list of people interested in your products...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right.<br />
<br />
Kevin: ...and then you mailed them about Byte Magazine?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is that right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Now, unfortunately, at that time, I had trouble with the IRS. One of my ad salesmen for 73 made a big mistake and offered a free ad to people who would start advertising with us. Well, immediately my competition told everybody about that and everybody that was advertising wanted a free ad. I had to fire the guy.<br />
<br />
Well he got even by telling the IRS that I was hiding money and the IRS came in and made life miserable. They came in and said, OK all this furniture in your office here that's a personal expense not a business expense, and you've had it for five or seven years so therefore you owe so much a year on that. Oh, this big camera that you're using for your photography, that's a two thousand dollar expense that was personal.<br />
<br />
They did one thing after another and built it up to where I owed about twenty thousand dollars and [laughs] took me to court. [laughs] At any rate, when I started the new magazine the lawyer said, well you better put it in somebody else's name for the time being. I had gotten back together with my first wife, who is now an ex-wife, and we had split up ten years before, and we got back together, and so I put it in her name, big mistake.<br />
<br />
After five issues, the magazine was going great guns and I came back from giving a talk one night and the magazine was gone, everything. All the files [laughs] , everything, was gone.<br />
<br />
Kevin: We're talking file cabinets, and pages laid out, and everything was just...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Everything got moved out, all the back issues and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you think you were robbed? What was your initial thought?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I knew right away what happened. I tried to get in touch with her. She said, "Oh, yes. We took the magazine."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Why do you think that happened? Why did she do that?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Because it was worth a lot of money. She published it for a few issues and then sold it to McGraw-Hill for $7 million dollars. Within a year or so it was billing over $1 million a month in ad sales and it got up to 800 pages a month, magazine. In the meantime I started to put out a magazine called "Kilobyte." and they threatened to sue, so I made it "Kilobaud." Then I put out one called "Desktop Computing", which was in plain English, not computerese, for business men.<br />
<br />
When Apple came out with their... well first I started with the Radio Shack computer, which was the biggest seller. They had 20 percent of the market with their TRS-80. I put out an "80 Micro" magazine. That got to be the third largest magazine in the country at 500 pages a month. [laughs] The reason Radio Shack got into this is because when I first got started with Byte I took the first issue with me down to MITS in Albuquerque.<br />
<br />
Then I stopped off in Fort Worth, Texas and visited an advertiser of mine in 73 who had a radio store there and showed him. I said this is going to be the big future. At any rate, then I went down to San Antonio where they were putting out a keyboard. I got an 8800 computer from MITS, the keyboard from the other place, and I made it work, and I said, "That's it, this is going to be great."<br />
<br />
I started "Byte Magazine," and at any rate the chap that I talked to in Fort Worth closed his store, went to work for Radio Shack, and the next thing I know they had a factory down there making TRS80's, and he was the head of it.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: That's a good gig.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right. But that got to be, as I said 20 percent of the market, and a couple of hundred small companies in there. I put out the magazine for that, and then I put out one for the color computer, called "Hot Cocoa." I put out another one called "Run."<br />
<br />
Kevin: For the Commodore, right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I put out one for the Apple, and I put out one for dealers called Selling Micros, and so forth and I covered the field pretty well. There was a big need for software, so I started Instant Software Company, and I brought a local motel that had 12 offices for me instead of rooms. I took the center part where they had a big restaurant, and made that into a computer lab and got a bunch of computers, and hired on a lot of programmers.<br />
<br />
What I did was have the readers, send in any program that they made, and we would market it for them. Pretty soon, I had a couple of hundred programs on there. I had all kinds, business programs, educational programs, entertainment programs and so forth, and we were the largest software dealer there, in the industry for a while. Anyway, I kept going with that, and finally I said, "Well, done that, [chuckles] done that."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Seems like for a while, you must have had many employees, filling up your 12 offices. How big was your empire?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I had over 250. When I brought the building next door to mine...My building wasn't bad, 40 rooms. The one next door was a little smaller, and then bought the motel, and another building up in North Peterborough for the books that we were putting out, and we put out a lot of books. We had a shipping department out in West Peterborough. [laughs] I don't know I'm like that, we grew and grew.<br />
<br />
Finally, I said, "Well I've done that, and I want to move on." Compact disks have come out, and the industry is ignoring them. The Music Magazines, Hi-Fi Magazines won't have anything to do with them, they say, "Well, we're always going to have LP's, so we don't need a new medium", and I said, "Boloney." First, I sold all my computer magazines to computer world, and got 16 million dollars for that to work with.<br />
<br />
I then started a "CD" review magazine, which within the year, became the largest music magazine, and "CD's" were in. [laughs] I built a studio, I got interested in ragtime. I went to see the movie "The Sting," and they had...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Scott Joplin.<br />
<br />
Wayne: ...this Scott Joplin music there, and I said "Wow, where have I been? How did I miss this?" I'd always been a classical music fan since I was seven years old and was first exposed to it. It was an instant take on classical.<br />
<br />
I was down in New Orleans at a music conference and I was walking along the street with my wife and I heard Scott Joplin music coming out of this bar. I'd been very disappointed, I'd bought every LP I could find on Scott Joplin, and the performers were all mechanical. They didn't feel the music, and I felt it. This guy, Scott Kirby, felt it. I went in and we sat down and had a couple Cokes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: This Scott Kirby guy is playing live in the venue?<br />
<br />
Wayne: He was playing in this bar, and I brought him to New Hampshire and we made a CD of Scott Joplin music and the result was so spectacular that I built us a $100,000 studio, one of the real state-of-the-art. No two walls parallel anywhere, and one wall all mirrors on hinges, with sponge spikes behind. You could vary the liveliness of the room however you wanted it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Bought a huge grand piano and so forth, and like that, so anyway, we put out a whole bunch of CD's.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Hold on a second. [pause] Sorry.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well anyway, that's how computers got started. That was the start of the whole industry was because there was computer hobbyist groups. That's who I was catering to with "Byte" to start with.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I want to go back to a couple of things. First of all, you said you sold all your magazines to Computer World.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You just felt done?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They were humming along. They're probably doing pretty well.<br />
<br />
Wayne: They were doing very well, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You were just bored with it?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah, I had to move on. Yes. Just like with 73, when I ran out of new things, I closed it. With computers, I ran out of new things. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Going back even farther, when your ex-wife took the magazine from you, how did you feel? Did you feel betrayed, or was it just like an opportunity?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, sure. I sued her a little bit and settled for $100,000, which she never paid. That's what it cost me to start it. No big deal. I've never worried about money, never fussed about it. It's not important to me. Getting things done, sharing, is the big deal for me. When I find something fun, interesting, I have to share it. And that's what gets the magazines started and so forth.<br />
<br />
After CDs, I got that going. Then I sold that magazine. The next interest was Cold Fusion. I'd heard about it, and I heard more and more as I investigated. And I went out to a Cold Fusion conference out in...<br />
<br />
Kevin: What year are we talking here?<br />
<br />
Wayne: 1993. I went out to a cold fusion conference on Maui, in the Hawaiian Islands. I went there a little early so I could scuba dive all six islands. As a result of going to that, I decided to start "Cold Fusion" magazine. I hired on Gene Mallove as the editor. He had worked for MIT in their publications department. MIT was one of the early places where they tested cold fusion. They sent out a report saying it didn't work.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was this the nuclear reaction in a coffee cup thing that was...am I thinking of the right thing?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah. I can give you a simple explanation of it. But anyway, Mallove looked into it and he said, "Hey, you fudged these figures." They said, "Shut up. We're getting millions for hot fusion research. Shut the hell up," so he quit. I met him at the conference and hired him on to edit the magazine.<br />
<br />
The magazine took off. Of course, when we got ready to print the fourth issue, I came into the office one day and everything was gone. Everything was cleaned out. He moved up to Maine and put out his own magazine there using all my magazine articles that had been submitted and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: This had to seem familiar?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yes, right. I hired a guy from Vermont who was an expert, but he was in lunatic asylum. I got him out and hired him on. We put out the magazine in reduced form for 28 issues. We published all the scientific papers by the top physicists on exactly how and why this works. Jim Patterson, an inventor down in Sarasota, Florida, demonstrated a cold fusion cell at an energy conference.<br />
<br />
It was about the size of a coffee mug. He had one watt of electricity going in and 1,000 watts of heat coming out for the length of this show. What you do is you take powdered nickel and put it in water. Then you pass electric currents through the water which separates it into hydrogen and oxygen, OK, you with me?<br />
<br />
The hydrogen is absorbed by the nickel which is like a sponge. The Oxygen molecule is too big, and it passes off. Of course, you use the powder so you have the maximum surface area on the Carbon. Pardon me, on the Nickel.<br />
<br />
When it gets 82 percent full of Hydrogen, it begins to combine with the Nickel to make Copper which is the next one up on the Scale of Atomic Weight. There's 0.2 mass left over, that's gone. If you look at Albert Einstein's e=mc^2. Energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light. A tiny but of mass lost is equal to a huge amount of energy which comes off as heat.<br />
<br />
When you get it up to 82 percent it begins generating heat and will generate a lot of heat. What I look forward to is a unit in every building's basement that generates all the heat and the electricity that you can use for almost nothing, less than a thousandth the cost of oil. It uses very little Nickel to generate an awful lot of energy.<br />
<br />
The Department of Energy, no doubt urged by the Oil Industry, and at that time the Bush's were President. They were oil people from way back. The Department of Energy sent out a message to all the colleges and universities, "If you do any research on Cold Fusion on an undergraduate level you get no more money from the government for anything." Then they went to the Patent Office and said, "You're not to even look at patent applications for Cold Fusion."<br />
<br />
Then the head of the Department of Energy put out a book, Zenga, called "Cold Fusion, the Fiasco of the Century." They buried it. There's some science that it's being re-interred if you look at E-cat. Looks like Andrea Rossi may be getting going with it. It is the future, it is the way things are going to go. It has to.<br />
<br />
It's one of three technologies that are going to totally change the world, totally. Not one, the next one is the Takahashi capacitor. If you're into electronics think of a capacitor one inch square, about an eighth of an inch thick that has one farad of capacity.<br />
<br />
Now, we all deal with millions of farad in all of our electronics. I drove scooter all over outer London one day, all day... powered by one of these capacitors, call it a battery, if you will. It was half the size of a Coca-Cola can. We're talking about a battery for cars or any vehicle about the size of a shoebox that will power a car for 500 miles, recharge in a few seconds, and of course your cold fusion is nonpolluting in any way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What's the third item?<br />
<br />
Wayne: The third item, a book came out by Dr. Bruno Comby called Maximize Immunity. He said, "Look, in every research project with dogs, cats, rats, mice and so forth, those fed the standard American diet were getting cancer, heart disease, and other human ailments and those fed raw food weren't. The ones on the American diet were living only half as long."<br />
<br />
They tried some rats and they took three groups of them. One fed raw food. The second fed the American diet. When they got to the age of 60, human age of 60, they did an autopsy to find out how they were.<br />
<br />
The ones on raw food were in perfect shape in every way. Those that survived on the human diet were in terrible shape. Their teeth were bad. Their guts were bad and so forth.<br />
<br />
The third group they put on the American diet with cooked food and when they got to be 30 years old, in the human context, they took them off that diet and put them on raw food. Those that survived that long they autopsied when they got to be the equivalent of 60 and all back in perfect shape again.<br />
<br />
Dr. Bruno Comby, not being real stupid, his hospital in Paris, Institute Comby and you can go to comby.com, Institute Comby. Put his patients on raw food diets and he said he was unable to find any incurable [chime] illnesses, none. Then, a few weeks after reading this, I heard Dr. Lorrain Day on the Art Bell show and she is or was a trauma surgeon in San Francisco and taught in hospitals.<br />
<br />
She got a breast cancer and you go to drday.com and you'll see that breast cancer. She knew that chemotherapy made everybody terribly sick and didn't save any lives, about 97 percent deaths on it. She didn't go that route. It got down to where the cancer went all through her body, and they gave her days to live, gave her last rites, and then she changed to a raw food diet, and total cure.<br />
<br />
Since then, she says she has found no incurable illnesses when you do this. There's a DVD out now, "Rawfor30 Days.com," which shows a group of people with long-term diabetes going on a 30-day raw food regime. At the end of 30 days, they were all totally cured of diabetes...all of them, type two diabetes.<br />
<br />
I said, "OK," and I wrote a book for Americans, since Bruno Comby is French. He did get an American translation. A fellow up in Canada did that for him. But he only had a limited printing of it, so I wrote my book, which went into all that with a lot more details on fluoride and the dangers of that, and so forth.<br />
<br />
That is where we stand, and that's the third one. If the word gets around on that, it's going to put the pharmaceutical industry out of business. That is our most profitable industry in the country. The top 10 pharmaceutical companies make more profits than the other 390 companies on the Forbes 400 list combined. We're talking $3 trillion if you get sick, and nothing if you get healthy...so there's no money in health. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Why don't we get back to...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Best of three. Oh, get back to computers.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Computer magazines.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Serves you right.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sorry. [laughs] You're writing a book about health. I'm writing a book about computer magazines.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well, I knew all the beginners.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sorry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I knew everybody in the field at the beginning.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah? Tell me interesting people you met.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, I don't know. Let's see...well Bill Godbout. He put out Godbout computers for a while.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You went to a lot of conferences, early computer conferences, I assume?<br />
<br />
Wayne: How about Steve Jobs? Maybe you read my thing on that, where I heard about the Apple computer, so my wife and I stopped by to visit him. Took me out...well, first he called Steve Wozniak over, who designed and built the Apple I.<br />
<br />
They took me out to the garage and showed it to me and he said, "What do you think?" I said, "I think you've got a winner." I said, "Up 'til now, all of our computers had a motherboard. You plugged in the processor. You plugged in the memory. You plugged in the communication. You plugged in the keyboard." I said, "You've got it all on one board. That's the way to go."<br />
<br />
Jobs said, "Well, what'll we do?" I said, "Well, there's a first computer conference that's going to be in Atlantic City in two weeks. Be there." He said, "Oh, I can't afford to fly." I said, "Take a bus. Be there." I had my booth there for the magazine and right opposite of me was the Apple booth with Steve Jobs. At the end of show he came over he said, "Wayne! Wayne! I'm in business! I've got 12 orders!" [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent. What was the conference? What was it called?<br />
<br />
Wayne: It was a computer conference for microcomputers. Then a year later I stopped by to visit him and he had a laboratory at that time and I talked with him for a while. I said, "Well, you've got the Apple II here. How are you going to market that?"<br />
<br />
He said, "Well I'm going to sell it direct like we've been doing the Apple I." I said, "Well, we've got some computer stores now. Why don't you sell it through those?" "Oh, they'd take a discount. No, we're not going to do that."<br />
<br />
I said, "Alright, here's what you do first thing Steve, first thing. Hire a marketing manager." He hired a marketing manager, Mark Hula and learned it [laughs] and they sold through stores. The result was a very successful company.<br />
<br />
If I'd been able to get through the wall around Steve Jobs, he'd still be alive. I think he had pancreatic cancer. It's so easy to cure if you change to raw food. I'm 90 doing raw food.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I'm 90 years old and doing raw food. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Seems to be working for you. You had your editorial team, how does a typical issue go together?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, of which? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Let's go with Microcomputing.<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Assuming Kilobaud...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well, whatever. Anyway, the articles would come in and I had an editor for each and we invested in a computer system for setting type. At first you had to set type with linotype and all that stuff in the early days and then finally got computerized. I was right at the beginning of all of those, one of the first adopters.<br />
<br />
I had a whole team of them in my 40 room house there, what had been a bowling alley part of the house we did for production and so forth. We all produced there. Then I added the other buildings, the one next door for the color computer and so forth.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I kept adding more buildings. The books came out of north Peterborough and we put out quite of few books there of software and other things.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Type in software books?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there ever any other negative feedback from advertisers who didn't like how a review came out or wanted things to be written a certain way?<br />
<br />
Wayne: No. I don't recall ever having trouble with advertisers in any way, no. They loved the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Talk about the typical reader of Kilobaud. Was it more of a hobbyist market than some other magazines?<br />
<br />
Wayne: It was all hobby at that time because you had computer clubs around the country and that was what it was.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you read computer magazines today?<br />
<br />
Wayne: No, done that. That's a "Been there, done that," same thing with amateur radio. Without new technologies I lost interest in that. I got interested in that...Well it first started when I was 12 and I went to church one day, to Sunday school. A fellow came in with a box of radio parts and asked my friend Alfie if he was interested and Alfie said, "No." "What about you Wayne?" I said, "You bet!"<br />
<br />
I took them home and there was an article in Popular Mechanics on building a cigar box radio. I had the parts so I built it and I was trapped for life. [laughs] I went into business selling postage stamps to make money for radio parts, always the entrepreneur, I'd buy 50 pound sacks of stamps torn off envelopes and then sell them in five pound lots and did a brisk business with that with ads in the stamp magazines.<br />
<br />
Anyway, that bought me the radio parts. Then I went to high school and they had a radio club and I went there, that's where I learned about amateur radio. Then the next thing you know I got my HAM radio license.<br />
<br />
Again, the forefront in amateur radio at that time was the microwave stuff and VHF. What did I do? I built a little two and half meter walkie-talkie and that was the first rig that I went on the air with when I got my HAM license, walking around town talking to friends on two and a half meters.<br />
<br />
Then of course the war came along so they closed down the HAM bands. I was going to college. I was in my second year at college by that time. I joined the Navy one day before the draft board got me.<br />
<br />
They were yanking me right out of college, so I made a good deal with the Navy on that. The fellow who worked for my dad...My dad was in aviation. He started the first transatlantic airline, American Export Airlines.<br />
<br />
One of the fellows that worked for him was in the reserves and got called back in when the war started and he put me in touch with a fellow who was running the lab, the electronics lab over in Virginia across the river from Washington DC. I went down and visited him, Commander Bourne and he said, "Wow! I want you on my staff."<br />
<br />
I joined the Navy and he said, "Now first we're going to send you to radio school, or electronic school in the Navy here for nine months and then we'll get going here. Let me know when you're out so I can do the papers to get you back here." I went to the electronic school, Radio Material School, graduated on top, number one. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Well I had been a C student all my life. At any rate, when I graduated I had a choice of getting in touch with Commander Bourne and going back to the lab. I said, "No. I'm more dispensable. Let's leave that for somebody with a wife and kids or something."<br />
<br />
I volunteered for submarine duty which was the most dangerous of all, they had the highest loss of any branch of the service because everybody that was in the submarines was on a submarine. They didn't have a large land support. The next thing you know I'm on a submarine, USS Drum, spent five war patrols on that and I've written a book on my adventures there and we were one of the top scoring boats.<br />
<br />
The boat is on display down in Alabama. At Mobile Alabama it's on display there and you can see pictures that I took 70 years ago of the crew and me, [laughs] and so forth. We had some very, very close escapes. I saved the boat personally twice with my fast action.<br />
<br />
I was the radar operator and of course when we were submerged I was on the sonar. Anyway, there's a lot of interesting stories there. After the war I got back into college again and became president of the radio club and I said, "Well golly. We need a radio station here." I started a wire broadcasting station.<br />
<br />
I went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute up in Troy, New York. I started WRPI and we did all kinds of interesting news and shows, plays and so forth, and brought girls in from the local girls' college for the girls' parts. Today, that is the largest student activity, is that radio station which is now an FM station.<br />
<br />
After I got out of college I went to work first for a radio station down in North Carolina. I got fed up with that and had an opportunity. The fellow who introduced me to classical music when I was seven had done an article on my dad's airport. My dad was hired to design and build and operate an airport for Philadelphia.<br />
<br />
He had done a survey for the Department of Commerce on all the airports around the country. He built the first concrete paved runway central airport there. He managed that until he quit and went to work for one of the first airlines, Ludington Airlines, which is owned by Tommy Ludington and Amelia Earhart. Amelia Earhart kept her plane at my dad's airport, the Lockheed, and I used to play in that when I was a kid. He had her over to dinner a number of times. I got to know her.<br />
<br />
I'm one of the few people that knows exactly what happened to her. Her mechanic was a good friend of my dad's. As a matter of fact, you can find on the Web where my dad is in the plane with Don Whemple when he married Ms. Philadelphia. They did it all in the air [laughs] with my dad being there. That made the... I found that on the Web. At any rate... on and on. [laughs] I'll do a book someday...<br />
<br />
Kevin: You should.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Volume one of 10.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well, anyway, that's how computers got started. Before that I did cell phones the same way. I was publishing the HAM magazine and a few HAM clubs put automatic repeaters or relays on top of mountains and tall buildings to extend the range of handy-talkies and mobiles. I said, "Wow, this is fun." I put one up on the local mountain, and it made it so that any mobile HAM anywhere in New England could talk to any other.<br />
<br />
I had a lot of fun with that and I had my little handy-talkie, talking through it and so forth. I put a bridge to 10 meters so they could talk all around the world there, if they wanted. I published hundreds of articles on repeaters, and a group out in Chicago put their repeater up on the top of the tallest building there, the Sears Tower, and had little receivers all spread around the outskirts of Chicago to pick up the mobile units and the handy-talkies and relay it through the Tower.<br />
<br />
I kept writing in my editorial and said, "Look, I'm able to ski the mountains of New Hampshire, Vermont, and Colorado, and Utah, and make telephone calls anywhere in the world through the local HAM repeater." I said, "Everybody's going to want to do this." Well, Art Householder, K9TRG, out in Chicago, was working for Motorola, and he took my editorials to the top people at Motorola, and he said, "Here," and that's where cell phones started. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Awesome.<br />
<br />
Wayne: But when I started, there were about half-a-dozen clubs with repeaters. By the time I got through publishing articles and a handbook and a list and so forth, there were over 8,000 repeaters around the country in the HAM clubs. I was flying from Johannesburg, South Africa... I was publishing with some computer magazines there, they invited me down.<br />
<br />
I said, "Well, I'll come down if you also include a trip to Swaziland and Lesotho", and they said, "Done." I was flying in a plane they hired for me from South Africa up to Mbanane in Swaziland. I was talking to the HAMs all around South Africa from the plane by way of the repeaters, and all of a sudden the Swaziland repeater came on, and I said, "That's it - we're everywhere." [laughs] Anyway, that's how cell phones got started.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Then, of course, when computers came along, I said, "I think I can...again." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: When you were starting the computer magazines, there was clubs. Were there other computer magazines that you started basing Byte and Kilobaud on? I don't know exactly the timeline of them, what came when, so...but you feel like you were the first.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, I was the first at it. By the time Radio Shack was big, they were going in everywhere. It was getting very popular. They were selling well. [laughs] The programs were coming on, making it so that you could write letters and send email and stuff like that, and the web was developing.<br />
<br />
Bill Gates, I met him first at MITS, when they had the first anniversary of their putting out their Altair 8800. They had a party, and I attended that, and we got asked, "Well, now, what do we do with these things?" The best that anybody could come up with was, "Well, you can use it to program the lawn watering." [laughs] That's all they could think of to do with them at that time. [laughs]<br />
<br />
But anyway, right a few days after Bill Gates started working there, he came in. I think he went to school at Harvard. As a part of a computer class, he did a program in BASIC. When the 8800 came out, there was no software for it at all, nothing, just some little switches on the front. He went down there with his BASIC, and they hired him on.<br />
<br />
IBM was busy with a big lawsuit because they had so dominated the mainframe business. When they finally got through with that, they wanted to get into these microcomputers. By the way, we had...when the minicomputer came along at one-tenth the cost of the mainframe, it put all but IBM out of the mainframe business. They hung on. But the minicomputers...what was it? I'll think of the name anyway...What was the big one? Olsen, DEC, Digital Equipment, and so forth.<br />
<br />
I sat down and had lunch with Olsen. I said, "You've got to start adopting these microcomputers." He said, "Oh, they're just toys. We're not going to be bothered with that." I went over to Data General, which was another big one, and sat down with the president there. He said the same thing, "We're not going to be bothered with that," and on and on.<br />
<br />
I talked to all of the top people in the minicomputer business. Of course, about two or three years later they're all out of business. The microcomputers just dominated everything at one-tenth the cost of a minicomputer. Anytime technology comes along that is one-tenth the cost, it's going to dominate. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: At what point did you realize that computing was going to move from the realm of hobbyist to an actual thing that everyone...?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I don't think there was any time. It just happens. I didn't think about that. I was just busy keeping up, keeping ahead, actually. [laughs] Then Computerworld came along. I got to know Pat McGovern, the head at Computerworld, met him at a conference and so forth. They wanted to buy my magazines and I said, "Well, I've done that. I'll move on." They bought them.<br />
<br />
They didn't put anybody... I think his people got irritated at him making the decision on that. They put not very bright people at the head of each project and all the magazines died.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How many magazines did you sell at that point? Do you know?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I think about five. You have to have somebody who sees the future and gets there first, which I have always done. With compact discs, I noticed that there were six companies making almost 96 percent of all the compact discs, only one of them American the other five were European. I said this is crazy, we've got all these independents out here and they only have four percent of the market.<br />
<br />
We got a group of people to check each CD that an independent put out and tell me what the best cut was on that and I put out samples discs, CDs with 15 different independent samples on it and gave them away totally free except for shipping and handling which paid for everything [laughs] and sold millions of those and the result was that the independent sales went from four percent to 16 percent of the market, over a billion dollars more to them and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You had this advertisement for the indy CD in your magazine?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah. I put out a special journal for the independents of course [laughs] and a special catalog et cetera.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When did you get out of the CD magazine industry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: When it matured. I was never in it as a business, just wanted to make it work. I sold it to IDG where it died, that's the same people that bought my computer magazines. [laughs] But we've got a lot of things we need to change in this country and I've got some good proposals for it.<br />
<br />
The federal government is incredibly bloated, have some over two million people working for the federal government and hiring more all the time. I know how we can cut the government in half in three years, with everybody involved, enthusiastically cooperating. How's that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sounds good!<br />
<br />
Wayne: We've got these stupid wars. We haven't won a war since World War II. We keep getting into them for political reasons and not winning. Like, the Vietnam War, what did we lose, 55,000 Americans over there doing that? You've got nothing.<br />
<br />
We're not getting anything much out of Afghanistan or Iraq now. The only reason we went there was this 9/11 thing which turns out to have been totally fudged. I have a way we can get out of there successfully and win, easily and quickly at almost no expense.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I've looked at your blog and I've read many of your opinions. You seem like an opinionated person, you don't keep them to yourself.<br />
<br />
Wayne: I do my research and I pride myself of not having any beliefs, because a belief prevents you from re-thinking things, or accepting new data. I say "What is the data, what are the facts?" the best I can find them. I have 54 bookshelves full of books that I've read, doing the research, and very, very few novels. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think, for the moment, I'm going to say, I'm...<br />
<br />
Wayne: This is, this is...<br />
<br />
Kevin: I have... That's all the questions that I have for now. I need to assess what we've talked about and see where I have follow up.<br />
<br />
Wayne: This was a long 15 minutes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs] Sorry.<br />
<br />
Wayne: The beard is new, I just grew that just for the hell of it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Looks good. I have mine because my wife went out of town for like a week once, and I just stopped shaving because I'm lazy. She came back, and she said OK, that can stay.<br />
<br />
Wayne: [laughs] Well, I thought I'd see what it grew into.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
Wayne: I [indecipherable 57:21] so I can be Santa Claus.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Well thank you for your time.<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK. Well, as you can tell, I hate talking, and it has to be pried out of me. [laughs] Have fun with your book.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Thanks.<br />
<br />
Wayne: I get a free copy, don't I?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Absolutely, yeah.<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: All right, thanks Wayne.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right-O.</div>Mauryhttps://www.computingpioneers.com/index.php?title=Wayne_Green&diff=191Wayne Green2021-10-19T23:41:24Z<p>Maury: </p>
<hr />
<div>This is a transcript of an audio interview. This transcript may contain errors - if you're using this material for research, etc. please verify with the original recorded interview.<br />
<br />
Source: Floppy Days vintage computing podcast<br />
<br />
Source URL: http://floppydays.libsyn.com/floppy-days-48-kevin-savetz-interviews-wayne-green and https://archive.org/details/WayneGreenInterview<br />
<br />
Interviewer: Kevin Savetz<br />
<br />
Wayne Green was founder of 73 magazine; Byte magazine; Kilobyte, which became Kilobaud, then Kilobaud Microcomputing; 80 Micro magazine for the TRS-80; Hot Coco for the TRS-80 Color Computer; Run for the Commodore 64, inCider magazine for the Apple II; and several other computer magazines. <br />
<br />
This interview took place over Skype on January 29, 2013, when Kevin was doing research for a book about the very first personal computer magazines — Byte, Kilobyte, and Creative Computing. Although he decided not to write the book, he is publishing the interviews. Wayne Green died on September 13, 2013, eight months after this interview.<br />
<br />
----<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wikipedia, which is never wrong, [sarcastically] says you were born in 1922. Is that right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yep. Why sure!<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yep. Why sure! That's New Hampshire for yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was my next question. It says you live in Hancock, New Hampshire.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yep.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Mostly I want to start talking about "Kilobaud," but before we get there, the first magazine you published was "73", is that right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well the first magazine, yeah. I published an extended news journal before that that got to 64 pages and had 2000 subscribers, called "Amateur Radio Frontiers." Then in 1960 I started "73 Magazine" for amateur radio and published that for 43 years. It was always about new HAM technologies.<br />
<br />
This is fun, this is fun, let's do this, let's do this, and so forth and then I ran out of them and I said, "Well, it was never about making money," although it did make a good deal of money, but I've never done anything saying "Hey I can make money." It's always "Someone needs to do this." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent! 73...you stopped at what year?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Two double-O, three.<br />
<br />
Kevin: 2003, OK. You started with that, had you any magazine publishing experience before that?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well just that Amateur Radio Frontiers that's all, and oh, yes, when I did Amateur Radio Frontiers, it started out about radio teletype, M teletype, and that got me a column in "CQ Magazine" one of the 2 HAM magazines, and then I got the editor a better job, he wasn't a HAM, I got him a better job with a new magazine that was starting and they hired me on as editor for five years and I did very nicely, had a wonderful time there so I learned all about publishing.<br />
<br />
Then the publisher, who is not a HAM either, bought a yacht, got overextended and got a year behind on paying my salary, so he fired me. I said, "Well, this is so much fun." I had just enough money to publish the first issue of "73." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wow.<br />
<br />
Wayne: That's how I got into that, but yes, I had experience with publishing with CQ. I knew the advertisers, they knew me, the readers knew me, and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was "Byte" your idea, or how did you get moved from HAM radio into computing?<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK, well, I kept getting more and more articles for 73 on computers by computer hobbyists that were tied in with HAM radio. Then one of my advertisers, MITS, Micro Instrument Telemetry Service, had been advertising with me. They put out a $129 four-banger calculator, adding machine, a little adding pad and so forth.<br />
<br />
All of a sudden, one of the Japanese companies came out with one for about $20, [laughs] and put him out of business. He had been making computers as a hobby, so he put together the Altair 8800 using the 8080 chip from Intel, and put it on the market, and I read about that, and I said, "Ah-hah. I think this is going to be..."<br />
<br />
I thought up a short name for a magazine in the field, and I came up with "Byte," which I thought was right on mark. [laughs] I wrote to all of the companies that were making equipment that the hobbyists were using, and said, "Please send me your mailing lists, the people who have asked for information or that have bought from you." I kept getting shoeboxes full of these names and addresses, and I sent them out, and I was getting a 20 percent response. Now on direct mail, one percent is good. [laughs] I started publishing Byte Magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You wrote to these companies saying, please send me the list of people interested in your products...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right.<br />
<br />
Kevin: ...and then you mailed them about Byte Magazine?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is that right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Now, unfortunately, at that time, I had trouble with the IRS. One of my ad salesmen for 73 made a big mistake and offered a free ad to people who would start advertising with us. Well, immediately my competition told everybody about that and everybody that was advertising wanted a free ad. I had to fire the guy.<br />
<br />
Well he got even by telling the IRS that I was hiding money and the IRS came in and made life miserable. They came in and said, OK all this furniture in your office here that's a personal expense not a business expense, and you've had it for five or seven years so therefore you owe so much a year on that. Oh, this big camera that you're using for your photography, that's a two thousand dollar expense that was personal.<br />
<br />
They did one thing after another and built it up to where I owed about twenty thousand dollars and [laughs] took me to court. [laughs] At any rate, when I started the new magazine the lawyer said, well you better put it in somebody else's name for the time being. I had gotten back together with my first wife, who is now an ex-wife, and we had split up ten years before, and we got back together, and so I put it in her name, big mistake.<br />
<br />
After five issues, the magazine was going great guns and I came back from giving a talk one night and the magazine was gone, everything. All the files [laughs] , everything, was gone.<br />
<br />
Kevin: We're talking file cabinets, and pages laid out, and everything was just...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Everything got moved out, all the back issues and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you think you were robbed? What was your initial thought?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I knew right away what happened. I tried to get in touch with her. She said, "Oh, yes. We took the magazine."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Why do you think that happened? Why did she do that?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Because it was worth a lot of money. She published it for a few issues and then sold it to McGraw-Hill for $7 million dollars. Within a year or so it was billing over $1 million a month in ad sales and it got up to 800 pages a month, magazine. In the meantime I started to put out a magazine called "Kilobyte." and they threatened to sue, so I made it "Kilobaud." Then I put out one called "Desktop Computing", which was in plain English, not computerese, for business men.<br />
<br />
When Apple came out with their... well first I started with the Radio Shack computer, which was the biggest seller. They had 20 percent of the market with their TRS-80. I put out an "80 Micro" magazine. That got to be the third largest magazine in the country at 500 pages a month. [laughs] The reason Radio Shack got into this is because when I first got started with Byte I took the first issue with me down to MITS in Albuquerque.<br />
<br />
Then I stopped off in Fort Worth, Texas and visited an advertiser of mine in 73 who had a radio store there and showed him. I said this is going to be the big future. At any rate, then I went down to San Antonio where they were putting out a keyboard. I got an 8800 computer from MITS, the keyboard from the other place, and I made it work, and I said, "That's it, this is going to be great."<br />
<br />
I started "Byte Magazine," and at any rate the chap that I talked to in Fort Worth closed his store, went to work for Radio Shack, and the next thing I know they had a factory down there making TRS80's, and he was the head of it.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: That's a good gig.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right. But that got to be, as I said 20 percent of the market, and a couple of hundred small companies in there. I put out the magazine for that, and then I put out one for the color computer, called "Hot Cocoa." I put out another one called "Run."<br />
<br />
Kevin: For the Commodore, right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I put out one for the Apple, and I put out one for dealers called Selling Micros, and so forth and I covered the field pretty well. There was a big need for software, so I started Instant Software Company, and I brought a local motel that had 12 offices for me instead of rooms. I took the center part where they had a big restaurant, and made that into a computer lab and got a bunch of computers, and hired on a lot of programmers.<br />
<br />
What I did was have the readers, send in any program that they made, and we would market it for them. Pretty soon, I had a couple of hundred programs on there. I had all kinds, business programs, educational programs, entertainment programs and so forth, and we were the largest software dealer there, in the industry for a while. Anyway, I kept going with that, and finally I said, "Well, done that, [chuckles] done that."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Seems like for a while, you must have had many employees, filling up your 12 offices. How big was your empire?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I had over 250. When I brought the building next door to mine...My building wasn't bad, 40 rooms. The one next door was a little smaller, and then bought the motel, and another building up in North Peterborough for the books that we were putting out, and we put out a lot of books. We had a shipping department out in West Peterborough. [laughs] I don't know I'm like that, we grew and grew.<br />
<br />
Finally, I said, "Well I've done that, and I want to move on." Compact disks have come out, and the industry is ignoring them. The Music Magazines, Hi-Fi Magazines won't have anything to do with them, they say, "Well, we're always going to have LP's, so we don't need a new medium", and I said, "Boloney." First, I sold all my computer magazines to computer world, and got 16 million dollars for that to work with.<br />
<br />
I then started a "CD" review magazine, which within the year, became the largest music magazine, and "CD's" were in. [laughs] I built a studio, I got interested in ragtime. I went to see the movie "The Sting," and they had...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Scott Joplin.<br />
<br />
Wayne: ...this Scott Joplin music there, and I said "Wow, where have I been? How did I miss this?" I'd always been a classical music fan since I was seven years old and was first exposed to it. It was an instant take on classical.<br />
<br />
I was down in New Orleans at a music conference and I was walking along the street with my wife and I heard Scott Joplin music coming out of this bar. I'd been very disappointed, I'd bought every LP I could find on Scott Joplin, and the performers were all mechanical. They didn't feel the music, and I felt it. This guy, Scott Kirby, felt it. I went in and we sat down and had a couple Cokes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: This Scott Kirby guy is playing live in the venue?<br />
<br />
Wayne: He was playing in this bar, and I brought him to New Hampshire and we made a CD of Scott Joplin music and the result was so spectacular that I built us a $100,000 studio, one of the real state-of-the-art. No two walls parallel anywhere, and one wall all mirrors on hinges, with sponge spikes behind. You could vary the liveliness of the room however you wanted it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Bought a huge grand piano and so forth, and like that, so anyway, we put out a whole bunch of CD's.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Hold on a second. [pause] Sorry.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well anyway, that's how computers got started. That was the start of the whole industry was because there was computer hobbyist groups. That's who I was catering to with "Byte" to start with.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I want to go back to a couple of things. First of all, you said you sold all your magazines to Computer World.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You just felt done?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They were humming along. They're probably doing pretty well.<br />
<br />
Wayne: They were doing very well, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You were just bored with it?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah, I had to move on. Yes. Just like with 73, when I ran out of new things, I closed it. With computers, I ran out of new things. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Going back even farther, when your ex-wife took the magazine from you, how did you feel? Did you feel betrayed, or was it just like an opportunity?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, sure. I sued her a little bit and settled for $100,000, which she never paid. That's when it cost me to start it. No big deal. I've never worried about money, never fussed about it. It's not important to me. Getting things done, sharing, is the big deal for me. When I find something fun, interesting, I have to share it. And that's what gets the magazines started and so forth.<br />
<br />
After CDs, I got that going. Then I sold that magazine. The next interest was Cold Fusion. I'd heard about it, and I heard more and more as I investigated. And I went out to a Cold Fusion conference out in...<br />
<br />
Kevin: What year are we talking here?<br />
<br />
Wayne: 1993. I went out to a cold fusion conference on Maui, in the Hawaiian Islands. I went there a little early so I could scuba dive all six islands. As a result of going to that, I decided to start "Cold Fusion" magazine. I hired on Gene Mallove as the editor. He had worked for MIT in their publications department. MIT was one of the early places where they tested cold fusion. They sent out a report saying it didn't work.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was this the nuclear reaction in a coffee cup thing that was...am I thinking of the right thing?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah. I can give you a simple explanation of it. But anyway, Mallove looked into it and he said, "Hey, you fudged these figures." They said, "Shut up. We're getting millions for hot fusion research. Shut the hell up," so he quit. I met him at the conference and hired him on to edit the magazine.<br />
<br />
The magazine took off. Of course, when we got ready to print the fourth issue, I came into the office one day and everything was gone. Everything was cleaned out. He moved up to Maine and put out his own magazine there using all my magazine articles that had been submitted and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: This had to seem familiar?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yes, right. I hired a guy from Vermont who was an expert, but he was in lunatic asylum. I got him out and hired him on. We put out the magazine in reduced form for 28 issues. We published all the scientific papers by the top physicists on exactly how and why this works. Jim Patterson, an inventor down in Sarasota, Florida, demonstrated a cold fusion cell at an energy conference.<br />
<br />
It was about the size of a coffee mug. He had one watt of electricity going in and 1,000 watts of heat coming out for the length of this show. What you do is you take powdered nickel and put it in water. Then you pass electric currents through the water which separates it into hydrogen and oxygen, OK, you with me?<br />
<br />
The hydrogen is absorbed by the nickel which is like a sponge. The Oxygen molecule is too big, and it passes off. Of course, you use the powder so you have the maximum surface area on the Carbon. Pardon me, on the Nickel.<br />
<br />
When it gets 82 percent full of Hydrogen, it begins to combine with the Nickel to make Copper which is the next one up on the Scale of Atomic Weight. There's 0.2 mass left over, that's gone. If you look at Albert Einstein's e=mc^2. Energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light. A tiny but of mass lost is equal to a huge amount of energy which comes off as heat.<br />
<br />
When you get it up to 82 percent it begins generating heat and will generate a lot of heat. What I look forward to is a unit in every building's basement that generates all the heat and the electricity that you can use for almost nothing, less than a thousandth the cost of oil. It uses very little Nickel to generate an awful lot of energy.<br />
<br />
The Department of Energy, no doubt urged by the Oil Industry, and at that time the Bush's were President. They were oil people from way back. The Department of Energy sent out a message to all the colleges and universities, "If you do any research on Cold Fusion on an undergraduate level you get no more money from the government for anything." Then they went to the Patent Office and said, "You're not to even look at patent applications for Cold Fusion."<br />
<br />
Then the head of the Department of Energy put out a book, Zenga, called "Cold Fusion, the Fiasco of the Century." They buried it. There's some science that it's being re-interred if you look at E-cat. Looks like Andrea Rossi may be getting going with it. It is the future, it is the way things are going to go. It has to.<br />
<br />
It's one of three technologies that are going to totally change the world, totally. Not one, the next one is the Takahashi capacitor. If you're into electronics think of a capacitor one inch square, about an eighth of an inch thick that has one farad of capacity.<br />
<br />
Now, we all deal with millions of farad in all of our electronics. I drove scooter all over outer London one day, all day... powered by one of these capacitors, call it a battery, if you will. It was half the size of a Coca-Cola can. We're talking about a battery for cars or any vehicle about the size of a shoebox that will power a car for 500 miles, recharge in a few seconds, and of course your cold fusion is nonpolluting in any way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What's the third item?<br />
<br />
Wayne: The third item, a book came out by Dr. Bruno Comby called Maximize Immunity. He said, "Look, in every research project with dogs, cats, rats, mice and so forth, those fed the standard American diet were getting cancer, heart disease, and other human ailments and those fed raw food weren't. The ones on the American diet were living only half as long."<br />
<br />
They tried some rats and they took three groups of them. One fed raw food. The second fed the American diet. When they got to the age of 60, human age of 60, they did an autopsy to find out how they were.<br />
<br />
The ones on raw food were in perfect shape in every way. Those that survived on the human diet were in terrible shape. Their teeth were bad. Their guts were bad and so forth.<br />
<br />
The third group they put on the American diet with cooked food and when they got to be 30 years old, in the human context, they took them off that diet and put them on raw food. Those that survived that long they autopsied when they got to be the equivalent of 60 and all back in perfect shape again.<br />
<br />
Dr. Bruno Comby, not being real stupid, his hospital in Paris, Institute Comby and you can go to comby.com, Institute Comby. Put his patients on raw food diets and he said he was unable to find any incurable [chime] illnesses, none. Then, a few weeks after reading this, I heard Dr. Lorrain Day on the Art Bell show and she is or was a trauma surgeon in San Francisco and taught in hospitals.<br />
<br />
She got a breast cancer and you go to drday.com and you'll see that breast cancer. She knew that chemotherapy made everybody terribly sick and didn't save any lives, about 97 percent deaths on it. She didn't go that route. It got down to where the cancer went all through her body, and they gave her days to live, gave her last rites, and then she changed to a raw food diet, and total cure.<br />
<br />
Since then, she says she has found no incurable illnesses when you do this. There's a DVD out now, "Rawfor30 Days.com," which shows a group of people with long-term diabetes going on a 30-day raw food regime. At the end of 30 days, they were all totally cured of diabetes...all of them, type two diabetes.<br />
<br />
I said, "OK," and I wrote a book for Americans, since Bruno Comby is French. He did get an American translation. A fellow up in Canada did that for him. But he only had a limited printing of it, so I wrote my book, which went into all that with a lot more details on fluoride and the dangers of that, and so forth.<br />
<br />
That is where we stand, and that's the third one. If the word gets around on that, it's going to put the pharmaceutical industry out of business. That is our most profitable industry in the country. The top 10 pharmaceutical companies make more profits than the other 390 companies on the Forbes 400 list combined. We're talking $3 trillion if you get sick, and nothing if you get healthy...so there's no money in health. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Why don't we get back to...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Best of three. Oh, get back to computers.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Computer magazines.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Serves you right.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sorry. [laughs] You're writing a book about health. I'm writing a book about computer magazines.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well, I knew all the beginners.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sorry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I knew everybody in the field at the beginning.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah? Tell me interesting people you met.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, I don't know. Let's see...well Bill Godbout. He put out Godbout computers for a while.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You went to a lot of conferences, early computer conferences, I assume?<br />
<br />
Wayne: How about Steve Jobs? Maybe you read my thing on that, where I heard about the Apple computer, so my wife and I stopped by to visit him. Took me out...well, first he called Steve Wozniak over, who designed and built the Apple I.<br />
<br />
They took me out to the garage and showed it to me and he said, "What do you think?" I said, "I think you've got a winner." I said, "Up 'til now, all of our computers had a motherboard. You plugged in the processor. You plugged in the memory. You plugged in the communication. You plugged in the keyboard." I said, "You've got it all on one board. That's the way to go."<br />
<br />
Jobs said, "Well, what'll we do?" I said, "Well, there's a first computer conference that's going to be in Atlantic City in two weeks. Be there." He said, "Oh, I can't afford to fly." I said, "Take a bus. Be there." I had my booth there for the magazine and right opposite of me was the Apple booth with Steve Jobs. At the end of show he came over he said, "Wayne! Wayne! I'm in business! I've got 12 orders!" [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent. What was the conference? What was it called?<br />
<br />
Wayne: It was a computer conference for microcomputers. Then a year later I stopped by to visit him and he had a laboratory at that time and I talked with him for a while. I said, "Well, you've got the Apple II here. How are you going to market that?"<br />
<br />
He said, "Well I'm going to sell it direct like we've been doing the Apple I." I said, "Well, we've got some computer stores now. Why don't you sell it through those?" "Oh, they'd take a discount. No, we're not going to do that."<br />
<br />
I said, "Alright, here's what you do first thing Steve, first thing. Hire a marketing manager." He hired a marketing manager, Mark Hula and learned it [laughs] and they sold through stores. The result was a very successful company.<br />
<br />
If I'd been able to get through the wall around Steve Jobs, he'd still be alive. I think he had pancreatic cancer. It's so easy to cure if you change to raw food. I'm 90 doing raw food.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I'm 90 years old and doing raw food. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Seems to be working for you. You had your editorial team, how does a typical issue go together?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, of which? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Let's go with Microcomputing.<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Assuming Kilobaud...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well, whatever. Anyway, the articles would come in and I had an editor for each and we invested in a computer system for setting type. At first you had to set type with linotype and all that stuff in the early days and then finally got computerized. I was right at the beginning of all of those, one of the first adopters.<br />
<br />
I had a whole team of them in my 40 room house there, what had been a bowling alley part of the house we did for production and so forth. We all produced there. Then I added the other buildings, the one next door for the color computer and so forth.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I kept adding more buildings. The books came out of north Peterborough and we put out quite of few books there of software and other things.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Type in software books?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there ever any other negative feedback from advertisers who didn't like how a review came out or wanted things to be written a certain way?<br />
<br />
Wayne: No. I don't recall ever having trouble with advertisers in any way, no. They loved the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Talk about the typical reader of Kilobaud. Was it more of a hobbyist market than some other magazines?<br />
<br />
Wayne: It was all hobby at that time because you had computer clubs around the country and that was what it was.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you read computer magazines today?<br />
<br />
Wayne: No, done that. That's a "Been there, done that," same thing with amateur radio. Without new technologies I lost interest in that. I got interested in that...Well it first started when I was 12 and I went to church one day, to Sunday school. A fellow came in with a box of radio parts and asked my friend Alfie if he was interested and Alfie said, "No." "What about you Wayne?" I said, "You bet!"<br />
<br />
I took them home and there was an article in Popular Mechanics on building a cigar box radio. I had the parts so I built it and I was trapped for life. [laughs] I went into business selling postage stamps to make money for radio parts, always the entrepreneur, I'd buy 50 pound sacks of stamps torn off envelopes and then sell them in five pound lots and did a brisk business with that with ads in the stamp magazines.<br />
<br />
Anyway, that bought me the radio parts. Then I went to high school and they had a radio club and I went there, that's where I learned about amateur radio. Then the next thing you know I got my HAM radio license.<br />
<br />
Again, the forefront in amateur radio at that time was the microwave stuff and VHF. What did I do? I built a little two and half meter walkie-talkie and that was the first rig that I went on the air with when I got my HAM license, walking around town talking to friends on two and a half meters.<br />
<br />
Then of course the war came along so they closed down the HAM bands. I was going to college. I was in my second year at college by that time. I joined the Navy one day before the draft board got me.<br />
<br />
They were yanking me right out of college, so I made a good deal with the Navy on that. The fellow who worked for my dad...My dad was in aviation. He started the first transatlantic airline, American Export Airlines.<br />
<br />
One of the fellows that worked for him was in the reserves and got called back in when the war started and he put me in touch with a fellow who was running the lab, the electronics lab over in Virginia across the river from Washington DC. I went down and visited him, Commander Bourne and he said, "Wow! I want you on my staff."<br />
<br />
I joined the Navy and he said, "Now first we're going to send you to radio school, or electronic school in the Navy here for nine months and then we'll get going here. Let me know when you're out so I can do the papers to get you back here." I went to the electronic school, Radio Material School, graduated on top, number one. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Well I had been a C student all my life. At any rate, when I graduated I had a choice of getting in touch with Commander Bourne and going back to the lab. I said, "No. I'm more dispensable. Let's leave that for somebody with a wife and kids or something."<br />
<br />
I volunteered for submarine duty which was the most dangerous of all, they had the highest loss of any branch of the service because everybody that was in the submarines was on a submarine. They didn't have a large land support. The next thing you know I'm on a submarine, USS Drum, spent five war patrols on that and I've written a book on my adventures there and we were one of the top scoring boats.<br />
<br />
The boat is on display down in Alabama. At Mobile Alabama it's on display there and you can see pictures that I took 70 years ago of the crew and me, [laughs] and so forth. We had some very, very close escapes. I saved the boat personally twice with my fast action.<br />
<br />
I was the radar operator and of course when we were submerged I was on the sonar. Anyway, there's a lot of interesting stories there. After the war I got back into college again and became president of the radio club and I said, "Well golly. We need a radio station here." I started a wire broadcasting station.<br />
<br />
I went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute up in Troy, New York. I started WRPI and we did all kinds of interesting news and shows, plays and so forth, and brought girls in from the local girls' college for the girls' parts. Today, that is the largest student activity, is that radio station which is now an FM station.<br />
<br />
After I got out of college I went to work first for a radio station down in North Carolina. I got fed up with that and had an opportunity. The fellow who introduced me to classical music when I was seven had done an article on my dad's airport. My dad was hired to design and build and operate an airport for Philadelphia.<br />
<br />
He had done a survey for the Department of Commerce on all the airports around the country. He built the first concrete paved runway central airport there. He managed that until he quit and went to work for one of the first airlines, Ludington Airlines, which is owned by Tommy Ludington and Amelia Earhart. Amelia Earhart kept her plane at my dad's airport, the Lockheed, and I used to play in that when I was a kid. He had her over to dinner a number of times. I got to know her.<br />
<br />
I'm one of the few people that knows exactly what happened to her. Her mechanic was a good friend of my dad's. As a matter of fact, you can find on the Web where my dad is in the plane with Don Whemple when he married Ms. Philadelphia. They did it all in the air [laughs] with my dad being there. That made the... I found that on the Web. At any rate... on and on. [laughs] I'll do a book someday...<br />
<br />
Kevin: You should.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Volume one of 10.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well, anyway, that's how computers got started. Before that I did cell phones the same way. I was publishing the HAM magazine and a few HAM clubs put automatic repeaters or relays on top of mountains and tall buildings to extend the range of handy-talkies and mobiles. I said, "Wow, this is fun." I put one up on the local mountain, and it made it so that any mobile HAM anywhere in New England could talk to any other.<br />
<br />
I had a lot of fun with that and I had my little handy-talkie, talking through it and so forth. I put a bridge to 10 meters so they could talk all around the world there, if they wanted. I published hundreds of articles on repeaters, and a group out in Chicago put their repeater up on the top of the tallest building there, the Sears Tower, and had little receivers all spread around the outskirts of Chicago to pick up the mobile units and the handy-talkies and relay it through the Tower.<br />
<br />
I kept writing in my editorial and said, "Look, I'm able to ski the mountains of New Hampshire, Vermont, and Colorado, and Utah, and make telephone calls anywhere in the world through the local HAM repeater." I said, "Everybody's going to want to do this." Well, Art Householder, K9TRG, out in Chicago, was working for Motorola, and he took my editorials to the top people at Motorola, and he said, "Here," and that's where cell phones started. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Awesome.<br />
<br />
Wayne: But when I started, there were about half-a-dozen clubs with repeaters. By the time I got through publishing articles and a handbook and a list and so forth, there were over 8,000 repeaters around the country in the HAM clubs. I was flying from Johannesburg, South Africa... I was publishing with some computer magazines there, they invited me down.<br />
<br />
I said, "Well, I'll come down if you also include a trip to Swaziland and Lesotho", and they said, "Done." I was flying in a plane they hired for me from South Africa up to Mbanane in Swaziland. I was talking to the HAMs all around South Africa from the plane by way of the repeaters, and all of a sudden the Swaziland repeater came on, and I said, "That's it - we're everywhere." [laughs] Anyway, that's how cell phones got started.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Then, of course, when computers came along, I said, "I think I can...again." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: When you were starting the computer magazines, there was clubs. Were there other computer magazines that you started basing Byte and Kilobaud on? I don't know exactly the timeline of them, what came when, so...but you feel like you were the first.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, I was the first at it. By the time Radio Shack was big, they were going in everywhere. It was getting very popular. They were selling well. [laughs] The programs were coming on, making it so that you could write letters and send email and stuff like that, and the web was developing.<br />
<br />
Bill Gates, I met him first at MITS, when they had the first anniversary of their putting out their Altair 8800. They had a party, and I attended that, and we got asked, "Well, now, what do we do with these things?" The best that anybody could come up with was, "Well, you can use it to program the lawn watering." [laughs] That's all they could think of to do with them at that time. [laughs]<br />
<br />
But anyway, right a few days after Bill Gates started working there, he came in. I think he went to school at Harvard. As a part of a computer class, he did a program in BASIC. When the 8800 came out, there was no software for it at all, nothing, just some little switches on the front. He went down there with his BASIC, and they hired him on.<br />
<br />
IBM was busy with a big lawsuit because they had so dominated the mainframe business. When they finally got through with that, they wanted to get into these microcomputers. By the way, we had...when the minicomputer came along at one-tenth the cost of the mainframe, it put all but IBM out of the mainframe business. They hung on. But the minicomputers...what was it? I'll think of the name anyway...What was the big one? Olsen, DEC, Digital Equipment, and so forth.<br />
<br />
I sat down and had lunch with Olsen. I said, "You've got to start adopting these microcomputers." He said, "Oh, they're just toys. We're not going to be bothered with that." I went over to Data General, which was another big one, and sat down with the president there. He said the same thing, "We're not going to be bothered with that," and on and on.<br />
<br />
I talked to all of the top people in the minicomputer business. Of course, about two or three years later they're all out of business. The microcomputers just dominated everything at one-tenth the cost of a minicomputer. Anytime technology comes along that is one-tenth the cost, it's going to dominate. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: At what point did you realize that computing was going to move from the realm of hobbyist to an actual thing that everyone...?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I don't think there was any time. It just happens. I didn't think about that. I was just busy keeping up, keeping ahead, actually. [laughs] Then Computerworld came along. I got to know Pat McGovern, the head at Computerworld, met him at a conference and so forth. They wanted to buy my magazines and I said, "Well, I've done that. I'll move on." They bought them.<br />
<br />
They didn't put anybody... I think his people got irritated at him making the decision on that. They put not very bright people at the head of each project and all the magazines died.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How many magazines did you sell at that point? Do you know?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I think about five. You have to have somebody who sees the future and gets there first, which I have always done. With compact discs, I noticed that there were six companies making almost 96 percent of all the compact discs, only one of them American the other five were European. I said this is crazy, we've got all these independents out here and they only have four percent of the market.<br />
<br />
We got a group of people to check each CD that an independent put out and tell me what the best cut was on that and I put out samples discs, CDs with 15 different independent samples on it and gave them away totally free except for shipping and handling which paid for everything [laughs] and sold millions of those and the result was that the independent sales went from four percent to 16 percent of the market, over a billion dollars more to them and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You had this advertisement for the indy CD in your magazine?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah. I put out a special journal for the independents of course [laughs] and a special catalog et cetera.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When did you get out of the CD magazine industry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: When it matured. I was never in it as a business, just wanted to make it work. I sold it to IDG where it died, that's the same people that bought my computer magazines. [laughs] But we've got a lot of things we need to change in this country and I've got some good proposals for it.<br />
<br />
The federal government is incredibly bloated, have some over two million people working for the federal government and hiring more all the time. I know how we can cut the government in half in three years, with everybody involved, enthusiastically cooperating. How's that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sounds good!<br />
<br />
Wayne: We've got these stupid wars. We haven't won a war since World War II. We keep getting into them for political reasons and not winning. Like, the Vietnam War, what did we lose, 55,000 Americans over there doing that? You've got nothing.<br />
<br />
We're not getting anything much out of Afghanistan or Iraq now. The only reason we went there was this 9/11 thing which turns out to have been totally fudged. I have a way we can get out of there successfully and win, easily and quickly at almost no expense.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I've looked at your blog and I've read many of your opinions. You seem like an opinionated person, you don't keep them to yourself.<br />
<br />
Wayne: I do my research and I pride myself of not having any beliefs, because a belief prevents you from re-thinking things, or accepting new data. I say "What is the data, what are the facts?" the best I can find them. I have 54 bookshelves full of books that I've read, doing the research, and very, very few novels. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think, for the moment, I'm going to say, I'm...<br />
<br />
Wayne: This is, this is...<br />
<br />
Kevin: I have... That's all the questions that I have for now. I need to assess what we've talked about and see where I have follow up.<br />
<br />
Wayne: This was a long 15 minutes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs] Sorry.<br />
<br />
Wayne: The beard is new, I just grew that just for the hell of it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Looks good. I have mine because my wife went out of town for like a week once, and I just stopped shaving because I'm lazy. She came back, and she said OK, that can stay.<br />
<br />
Wayne: [laughs] Well, I thought I'd see what it grew into.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
Wayne: I [indecipherable 57:21] so I can be Santa Claus.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Well thank you for your time.<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK. Well, as you can tell, I hate talking, and it has to be pried out of me. [laughs] Have fun with your book.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Thanks.<br />
<br />
Wayne: I get a free copy, don't I?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Absolutely, yeah.<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: All right, thanks Wayne.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right-O.</div>Mauryhttps://www.computingpioneers.com/index.php?title=Wayne_Green&diff=190Wayne Green2021-10-19T21:10:18Z<p>Maury: </p>
<hr />
<div>This is a transcript of an audio interview. This transcript may contain errors - if you're using this material for research, etc. please verify with the original recorded interview.<br />
<br />
Source: Floppy Days vintage computing podcast<br />
<br />
Source URL: http://floppydays.libsyn.com/floppy-days-48-kevin-savetz-interviews-wayne-green and https://archive.org/details/WayneGreenInterview<br />
<br />
Interviewer: Kevin Savetz<br />
<br />
Wayne Green was founder of 73 magazine; Byte magazine; Kilobyte, which became Kilobaud, then Kilobaud Microcomputing; 80 Micro magazine for the TRS-80; Hot Coco for the TRS-80 Color Computer; Run for the Commodore 64, inCider magazine for the Apple II; and several other computer magazines. <br />
<br />
This interview took place over Skype on January 29, 2013, when Kevin was doing research for a book about the very first personal computer magazines — Byte, Kilobyte, and Creative Computing. Although he decided not to write the book, he is publishing the interviews. Wayne Green died on September 13, 2013, eight months after this interview.<br />
<br />
----<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wikipedia, which is never wrong, [sarcastically] says you were born in 1922. Is that right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yep. Why sure!<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yep. Why sure! That's New Hampshire for yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was my next question. It says you live in Hancock, New Hampshire.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yep.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Mostly I want to start talking about "Kilobaud," but before we get there, the first magazine you published was "73", is that right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well the first magazine, yeah. I published an extended news journal before that that got to 64 pages and had 2000 subscribers, called "Amateur Radio Frontiers." Then in 1960 I started "73 Magazine" for amateur radio and published that for 43 years. It was always about new HAM technologies.<br />
<br />
This is fun, this is fun, let's do this, let's do this, and so forth and then I ran out of them and I said, "Well, it was never about making money," although it did make a good deal of money, but I've never done anything saying "Hey I can make money." It's always "Someone needs to do this." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent! 73...you stopped at what year?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Two double-O, three.<br />
<br />
Kevin: 2003, OK. You started with that, had you any magazine publishing experience before that?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well just that Amateur Radio Frontiers that's all, and oh, yes, when I did Amateur Radio Frontiers, it started out about radio teletype, M teletype, and that got me a column in "CQ Magazine" one of the 2 HAM magazines, and then I got the editor a better job, he wasn't a HAM, I got him a better job with a new magazine that was starting and they hired me on as editor for five years and I did very nicely, had a wonderful time there so I learned all about publishing.<br />
<br />
Then the publisher, who is not a HAM either, bought a yacht, got overextended and got a year behind on paying my salary, so he fired me. I said, "Well, this is so much fun." I had just enough money to publish the first issue of "73." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wow.<br />
<br />
Wayne: That's how I got into that, but yes, I had experience with publishing with CQ. I knew the advertisers, they knew me, the readers knew me, and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was "Byte" your idea, or how did you get moved from HAM radio into computing?<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK, well, I kept getting more and more articles for 73 on computers by computer hobbyists that were tied in with HAM radio. Then one of my advertisers, MITS, Micro Instrument Telemetry Service, had been advertising with me. They put out a $129 four-banger calculator, adding machine, a little adding pad and so forth.<br />
<br />
All of a sudden, one of the Japanese companies came out with one for about $20, [laughs] and put him out of business. He had been making computers as a hobby, so he put together the Altair 8800 using the 8080 chip from Intel, and put it on the market, and I read about that, and I said, "Ah-hah. I think this is going to be..."<br />
<br />
I thought up a short name for a magazine in the field, and I came up with "Byte," which I thought was right on mark. [laughs] I wrote to all of the companies that were making equipment that the hobbyists were using, and said, "Please send me your mailing lists, the people who have asked for information or that have bought from you." I kept getting shoeboxes full of these names and addresses, and I sent them out, and I was getting a 20 percent response. Now on direct mail, one percent is good. [laughs] I started publishing Byte Magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You wrote to these companies saying, please send me the list of people interested in your products...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right.<br />
<br />
Kevin: ...and then you mailed them about Byte Magazine?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is that right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Now, unfortunately, at that time, I had trouble with the IRS. One of my ad salesmen for 73 made a big mistake and offered a free ad to people who would start advertising with us. Well, immediately my competition told everybody about that and everybody that was advertising wanted a free ad. I had to fire the guy.<br />
<br />
Well he got even by telling the IRS that I was hiding money and the IRS came in and made life miserable. They came in and said, OK all this furniture in your office here that's a personal expense not a business expense, and you've had it for five or seven years so therefore you owe so much a year on that. Oh, this big camera that you're using for your photography, that's a two thousand dollar expense that was personal.<br />
<br />
They did one thing after another and built it up to where I owed about twenty thousand dollars and [laughs] took me to court. [laughs] At any rate, when I started the new magazine the lawyer said, well you better put it in somebody else's name for the time being. I had gotten back together with my first wife, who is now an ex-wife, and we had split up ten years before, and we got back together, and so I put it in her name, big mistake.<br />
<br />
After five issues, the magazine was going great guns and I came back from giving a talk one night and the magazine was gone, everything. All the files [laughs] , everything, was gone.<br />
<br />
Kevin: We're talking file cabinets, and pages laid out, and everything was just...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Everything got moved out, all the back issues and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you think you were robbed? What was your initial thought?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I knew right away what happened. I tried to get in touch with her. She said, "Oh, yes. We took the magazine."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Why do you think that happened? Why did she do that?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Because it was worth a lot of money. She published it for a few issues and then sold it to McGraw-Hill for $7 million dollars. Within a year or so it was billing over $1 million a month in ad sales and it got up to 800 pages a month, magazine. In the meantime I started to put out a magazine called "Kilobyte." and they threatened to sue, so I made it "Kilobaud." Then I put out one called "Desktop Computing", which was in plain English, not computerese, for business men.<br />
<br />
When Apple came out with their... well first I started with the Radio Shack computer, which was the biggest seller. They had 20 percent of the market with their TRS-80. I put out an "80 Micro" magazine. That got to be the third largest magazine in the country at 500 pages a month. [laughs] The reason Radio Shack got into this is because when I first got started with Byte I took the first issue with me down to MITS in Albuquerque.<br />
<br />
Then I stopped off in Fort Worth, Texas and visited an advertiser of mine in 73 who had a radio store there and showed him. I said this is going to be the big future. At any rate, then I went down to San Antonio where they were putting out a keyboard. I got an 8800 computer from MITS, the keyboard from the other place, and I made it work, and I said, "That's it, this is going to be great."<br />
<br />
I started "Byte Magazine," and at any rate the chap that I talked to in Fort Worth closed his store, went to work for Radio Shack, and the next thing I know they had a factory down there making TRS80's, and he was the head of it.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: That's a good gig.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right. But that got to be, as I said 20 percent of the market, and a couple of hundred small companies in there. I put out the magazine for that, and then I put out one for the color computer, called "Hot Cocoa." I put out another one called "Run."<br />
<br />
Kevin: For the Commodore, right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I put out one for the Apple, and I put out one for dealers called Selling Micros, and so forth and I covered the field pretty well. There was a big need for software, so I started Instant Software Company, and I brought a local motel that had 12 offices for me instead of rooms. I took the center part where they had a big restaurant, and made that into a computer lab and got a bunch of computers, and hired on a lot of programmers.<br />
<br />
What I did was have the readers, send in any program that they made, and we would market it for them. Pretty soon, I had a couple of hundred programs on there. I had all kinds, business programs, educational programs, entertainment programs and so forth, and we were the largest software dealer there, in the industry for a while. Anyway, I kept going with that, and finally I said, "Well, done that, [chuckles] done that."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Seems like for a while, you must have had many employees, filling up your 12 offices. How big was your empire?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I had over 250. When I brought the building next door to mine...My building wasn't bad, 40 rooms. The one next door was a little smaller, and then bought the motel, and another building up in North Peter borough for the books that we were putting out, and we put out a lot of books. We had a shipping department out in West Peterborough. [laughs] I don't know I'm like that, we grew and grew.<br />
<br />
Finally, I said, "Well I've done that, and I want to move on." Compact disks have come out, and the industry is ignoring them. The Music Magazines, Hi-Fi Magazines won't have anything to do with them, they say, "Well, we're always going to have LP's, so we don't need a new medium", and I said, "Boloney." First, I sold all my computer magazines to computer world, and got 16 million dollars for that to work with.<br />
<br />
I then started a "CD" review magazine, which within the year, became the largest music magazine, and "CD's" were in. [laughs] I built a studio, I got interested in ragtime. I went to see the movie "The Sting," and they had...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Scott Joplin.<br />
<br />
Wayne: ...this Scott Joplin music there, and I said "Wow, where have I been? How did I miss this?" I'd always been a classical music fan since I was seven years old and was first exposed to it. It was an instant take on classical.<br />
<br />
I was down in New Orleans at a music conference and I was walking along the street with my wife and I heard Scott Joplin music coming out of this bar. I'd been very disappointed, I'd bought every LP I could find on Scott Joplin, and the performers were all mechanical. They didn't feel the music, and I felt it. This guy, Scott Kirby, felt it. I went in and we sat down and had a couple Cokes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: This Scott Kirby guy is playing live in the venue?<br />
<br />
Wayne: He was playing in this bar, and I brought him to New Hampshire and we made a CD of Scott Joplin music and the result was so spectacular that I built us a $100,000 studio, one of the real state-of-the-art. No two walls parallel anywhere, and one wall all mirrors on hinges, with sponge spikes behind. You could vary the liveliness of the room however you wanted it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Bought a huge grand piano and so forth, and like that, so anyway, we put out a whole bunch of CD's.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Hold on a second. [pause] Sorry.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well anyway, that's how computers got started. That was the start of the whole industry was because there was computer hobbyist groups. That's who I was catering to with "Byte" to start with.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I want to go back to a couple of things. First of all, you said you sold all your magazines to Computer World.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You just felt done?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They were humming along. They're probably doing pretty well.<br />
<br />
Wayne: They were doing very well, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You were just bored with it?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah, I had to move on. Yes. Just like with 73, when I ran out of new things, I closed it. With computers, I ran out of new things. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Going back even farther, when your ex-wife took the magazine from you, how did you feel? Did you feel betrayed, or was it just like an opportunity?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, sure. I sued her a little bit and settled for $100,000, which she never paid. That's when it cost me to start it. No big deal. I've never worried about money, never fussed about it. It's not important to me. Getting things done, sharing, is the big deal for me. When I find something fun, interesting, I have to share it. And that's what gets the magazines started and so forth.<br />
<br />
After CDs, I got that going. Then I sold that magazine. The next interest was Cold Fusion. I'd heard about it, and I heard more and more as I investigated. And I went out to a Cold Fusion conference out in...<br />
<br />
Kevin: What year are we talking here?<br />
<br />
Wayne: 1993. I went out to a cold fusion conference on Maui, in the Hawaiian Islands. I went there a little early so I could scuba dive all six islands. As a result of going to that, I decided to start "Cold Fusion" magazine. I hired on Gene Mallove as the editor. He had worked for MIT in their publications department. MIT was one of the early places where they tested cold fusion. They sent out a report saying it didn't work.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was this the nuclear reaction in a coffee cup thing that was...am I thinking of the right thing?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah. I can give you a simple explanation of it. But anyway, Mallove looked into it and he said, "Hey, you fudged these figures." They said, "Shut up. We're getting millions for hot fusion research. Shut the hell up," so he quit. I met him at the conference and hired him on to edit the magazine.<br />
<br />
The magazine took off. Of course, when we got ready to print the fourth issue, I came into the office one day and everything was gone. Everything was cleaned out. He moved up to Maine and put out his own magazine there using all my magazine articles that had been submitted and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: This had to seem familiar?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yes, right. I hired a guy from Vermont who was an expert, but he was in lunatic asylum. I got him out and hired him on. We put out the magazine in reduced form for 28 issues. We published all the scientific papers by the top physicists on exactly how and why this works. Jim Patterson, an inventor down in Sarasota, Florida, demonstrated a cold fusion cell at an energy conference.<br />
<br />
It was about the size of a coffee mug. He had one watt of electricity going in and 1,000 watts of heat coming out for the length of this show. What you do is you take powdered nickel and put it in water. Then you pass electric currents through the water which separates it into hydrogen and oxygen, OK, you with me?<br />
<br />
The hydrogen is absorbed by the nickel which is like a sponge. The Oxygen molecule is too big, and it passes off. Of course, you use the powder so you have the maximum surface area on the Carbon. Pardon me, on the Nickel.<br />
<br />
When it gets 82 percent full of Hydrogen, it begins to combine with the Nickel to make Copper which is the next one up on the Scale of Atomic Weight. There's 0.2 mass left over, that's gone. If you look at Albert Einstein's e=mc^2. Energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light. A tiny but of mass lost is equal to a huge amount of energy which comes off as heat.<br />
<br />
When you get it up to 82 percent it begins generating heat and will generate a lot of heat. What I look forward to is a unit in every building's basement that generates all the heat and the electricity that you can use for almost nothing, less than a thousandth the cost of oil. It uses very little Nickel to generate an awful lot of energy.<br />
<br />
The Department of Energy, no doubt urged by the Oil Industry, and at that time the Bush's were President. They were oil people from way back. The Department of Energy sent out a message to all the colleges and universities, "If you do any research on Cold Fusion on an undergraduate level you get no more money from the government for anything." Then they went to the Patent Office and said, "You're not to even look at patent applications for Cold Fusion."<br />
<br />
Then the head of the Department of Energy put out a book, Zenga, called "Cold Fusion, the Fiasco of the Century." They buried it. There's some science that it's being re-interred if you look at E-cat. Looks like Andrea Rossi may be getting going with it. It is the future, it is the way things are going to go. It has to.<br />
<br />
It's one of three technologies that are going to totally change the world, totally. Not one, the next one is the Takahashi capacitor. If you're into electronics think of a capacitor one inch square, about an eighth of an inch thick that has one farad of capacity.<br />
<br />
Now, we all deal with millions of farad in all of our electronics. I drove scooter all over outer London one day, all day... powered by one of these capacitors, call it a battery, if you will. It was half the size of a Coca-Cola can. We're talking about a battery for cars or any vehicle about the size of a shoebox that will power a car for 500 miles, recharge in a few seconds, and of course your cold fusion is nonpolluting in any way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What's the third item?<br />
<br />
Wayne: The third item, a book came out by Dr. Bruno Comby called Maximize Immunity. He said, "Look, in every research project with dogs, cats, rats, mice and so forth, those fed the standard American diet were getting cancer, heart disease, and other human ailments and those fed raw food weren't. The ones on the American diet were living only half as long."<br />
<br />
They tried some rats and they took three groups of them. One fed raw food. The second fed the American diet. When they got to the age of 60, human age of 60, they did an autopsy to find out how they were.<br />
<br />
The ones on raw food were in perfect shape in every way. Those that survived on the human diet were in terrible shape. Their teeth were bad. Their guts were bad and so forth.<br />
<br />
The third group they put on the American diet with cooked food and when they got to be 30 years old, in the human context, they took them off that diet and put them on raw food. Those that survived that long they autopsied when they got to be the equivalent of 60 and all back in perfect shape again.<br />
<br />
Dr. Bruno Comby, not being real stupid, his hospital in Paris, Institute Comby and you can go to comby.com, Institute Comby. Put his patients on raw food diets and he said he was unable to find any incurable [chime] illnesses, none. Then, a few weeks after reading this, I heard Dr. Lorrain Day on the Art Bell show and she is or was a trauma surgeon in San Francisco and taught in hospitals.<br />
<br />
She got a breast cancer and you go to drday.com and you'll see that breast cancer. She knew that chemotherapy made everybody terribly sick and didn't save any lives, about 97 percent deaths on it. She didn't go that route. It got down to where the cancer went all through her body, and they gave her days to live, gave her last rites, and then she changed to a raw food diet, and total cure.<br />
<br />
Since then, she says she has found no incurable illnesses when you do this. There's a DVD out now, "Rawfor30 Days.com," which shows a group of people with long-term diabetes going on a 30-day raw food regime. At the end of 30 days, they were all totally cured of diabetes...all of them, type two diabetes.<br />
<br />
I said, "OK," and I wrote a book for Americans, since Bruno Comby is French. He did get an American translation. A fellow up in Canada did that for him. But he only had a limited printing of it, so I wrote my book, which went into all that with a lot more details on fluoride and the dangers of that, and so forth.<br />
<br />
That is where we stand, and that's the third one. If the word gets around on that, it's going to put the pharmaceutical industry out of business. That is our most profitable industry in the country. The top 10 pharmaceutical companies make more profits than the other 390 companies on the Forbes 400 list combined. We're talking $3 trillion if you get sick, and nothing if you get healthy...so there's no money in health. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Why don't we get back to...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Best of three. Oh, get back to computers.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Computer magazines.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Serves you right.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sorry. [laughs] You're writing a book about health. I'm writing a book about computer magazines.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well, I knew all the beginners.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sorry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I knew everybody in the field at the beginning.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah? Tell me interesting people you met.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, I don't know. Let's see...well Bill Godbout. He put out Godbout computers for a while.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You went to a lot of conferences, early computer conferences, I assume?<br />
<br />
Wayne: How about Steve Jobs? Maybe you read my thing on that, where I heard about the Apple computer, so my wife and I stopped by to visit him. Took me out...well, first he called Steve Wozniak over, who designed and built the Apple I.<br />
<br />
They took me out to the garage and showed it to me and he said, "What do you think?" I said, "I think you've got a winner." I said, "Up 'til now, all of our computers had a motherboard. You plugged in the processor. You plugged in the memory. You plugged in the communication. You plugged in the keyboard." I said, "You've got it all on one board. That's the way to go."<br />
<br />
Jobs said, "Well, what'll we do?" I said, "Well, there's a first computer conference that's going to be in Atlantic City in two weeks. Be there." He said, "Oh, I can't afford to fly." I said, "Take a bus. Be there." I had my booth there for the magazine and right opposite of me was the Apple booth with Steve Jobs. At the end of show he came over he said, "Wayne! Wayne! I'm in business! I've got 12 orders!" [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent. What was the conference? What was it called?<br />
<br />
Wayne: It was a computer conference for microcomputers. Then a year later I stopped by to visit him and he had a laboratory at that time and I talked with him for a while. I said, "Well, you've got the Apple II here. How are you going to market that?"<br />
<br />
He said, "Well I'm going to sell it direct like we've been doing the Apple I." I said, "Well, we've got some computer stores now. Why don't you sell it through those?" "Oh, they'd take a discount. No, we're not going to do that."<br />
<br />
I said, "Alright, here's what you do first thing Steve, first thing. Hire a marketing manager." He hired a marketing manager, Mark Hula and learned it [laughs] and they sold through stores. The result was a very successful company.<br />
<br />
If I'd been able to get through the wall around Steve Jobs, he'd still be alive. I think he had pancreatic cancer. It's so easy to cure if you change to raw food. I'm 90 doing raw food.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I'm 90 years old and doing raw food. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Seems to be working for you. You had your editorial team, how does a typical issue go together?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, of which? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Let's go with Microcomputing.<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Assuming Kilobaud...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well, whatever. Anyway, the articles would come in and I had an editor for each and we invested in a computer system for setting type. At first you had to set type with linotype and all that stuff in the early days and then finally got computerized. I was right at the beginning of all of those, one of the first adopters.<br />
<br />
I had a whole team of them in my 40 room house there, what had been a bowling alley part of the house we did for production and so forth. We all produced there. Then I added the other buildings, the one next door for the color computer and so forth.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I kept adding more buildings. The books came out of north Peterborough and we put out quite of few books there of software and other things.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Type in software books?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there ever any other negative feedback from advertisers who didn't like how a review came out or wanted things to be written a certain way?<br />
<br />
Wayne: No. I don't recall ever having trouble with advertisers in any way, no. They loved the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Talk about the typical reader of Kilobaud. Was it more of a hobbyist market than some other magazines?<br />
<br />
Wayne: It was all hobby at that time because you had computer clubs around the country and that was what it was.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you read computer magazines today?<br />
<br />
Wayne: No, done that. That's a "Been there, done that," same thing with amateur radio. Without new technologies I lost interest in that. I got interested in that...Well it first started when I was 12 and I went to church one day, to Sunday school. A fellow came in with a box of radio parts and asked my friend Alfie if he was interested and Alfie said, "No." "What about you Wayne?" I said, "You bet!"<br />
<br />
I took them home and there was an article in Popular Mechanics on building a cigar box radio. I had the parts so I built it and I was trapped for life. [laughs] I went into business selling postage stamps to make money for radio parts, always the entrepreneur, I'd buy 50 pound sacks of stamps torn off envelopes and then sell them in five pound lots and did a brisk business with that with ads in the stamp magazines.<br />
<br />
Anyway, that bought me the radio parts. Then I went to high school and they had a radio club and I went there, that's where I learned about amateur radio. Then the next thing you know I got my HAM radio license.<br />
<br />
Again, the forefront in amateur radio at that time was the microwave stuff and VHF. What did I do? I built a little two and half meter walkie-talkie and that was the first rig that I went on the air with when I got my HAM license, walking around town talking to friends on two and a half meters.<br />
<br />
Then of course the war came along so they closed down the HAM bands. I was going to college. I was in my second year at college by that time. I joined the Navy one day before the draft board got me.<br />
<br />
They were yanking me right out of college, so I made a good deal with the Navy on that. The fellow who worked for my dad...My dad was in aviation. He started the first transatlantic airline, American Export Airlines.<br />
<br />
One of the fellows that worked for him was in the reserves and got called back in when the war started and he put me in touch with a fellow who was running the lab, the electronics lab over in Virginia across the river from Washington DC. I went down and visited him, Commander Bourne and he said, "Wow! I want you on my staff."<br />
<br />
I joined the Navy and he said, "Now first we're going to send you to radio school, or electronic school in the Navy here for nine months and then we'll get going here. Let me know when you're out so I can do the papers to get you back here." I went to the electronic school, Radio Material School, graduated on top, number one. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Well I had been a C student all my life. At any rate, when I graduated I had a choice of getting in touch with Commander Bourne and going back to the lab. I said, "No. I'm more dispensable. Let's leave that for somebody with a wife and kids or something."<br />
<br />
I volunteered for submarine duty which was the most dangerous of all, they had the highest loss of any branch of the service because everybody that was in the submarines was on a submarine. They didn't have a large land support. The next thing you know I'm on a submarine, USS Drum, spent five war patrols on that and I've written a book on my adventures there and we were one of the top scoring boats.<br />
<br />
The boat is on display down in Alabama. At Mobile Alabama it's on display there and you can see pictures that I took 70 years ago of the crew and me, [laughs] and so forth. We had some very, very close escapes. I saved the boat personally twice with my fast action.<br />
<br />
I was the radar operator and of course when we were submerged I was on the sonar. Anyway, there's a lot of interesting stories there. After the war I got back into college again and became president of the radio club and I said, "Well golly. We need a radio station here." I started a wire broadcasting station.<br />
<br />
I went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute up in Troy, New York. I started WRPI and we did all kinds of interesting news and shows, plays and so forth, and brought girls in from the local girls' college for the girls' parts. Today, that is the largest student activity, is that radio station which is now an FM station.<br />
<br />
After I got out of college I went to work first for a radio station down in North Carolina. I got fed up with that and had an opportunity. The fellow who introduced me to classical music when I was seven had done an article on my dad's airport. My dad was hired to design and build and operate an airport for Philadelphia.<br />
<br />
He had done a survey for the Department of Commerce on all the airports around the country. He built the first concrete paved runway central airport there. He managed that until he quit and went to work for one of the first airlines, Ludington Airlines, which is owned by Tommy Ludington and Amelia Earhart. Amelia Earhart kept her plane at my dad's airport, the Lockheed, and I used to play in that when I was a kid. He had her over to dinner a number of times. I got to know her.<br />
<br />
I'm one of the few people that knows exactly what happened to her. Her mechanic was a good friend of my dad's. As a matter of fact, you can find on the Web where my dad is in the plane with Don Whemple when he married Ms. Philadelphia. They did it all in the air [laughs] with my dad being there. That made the... I found that on the Web. At any rate... on and on. [laughs] I'll do a book someday...<br />
<br />
Kevin: You should.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Volume one of 10.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well, anyway, that's how computers got started. Before that I did cell phones the same way. I was publishing the HAM magazine and a few HAM clubs put automatic repeaters or relays on top of mountains and tall buildings to extend the range of handy-talkies and mobiles. I said, "Wow, this is fun." I put one up on the local mountain, and it made it so that any mobile HAM anywhere in New England could talk to any other.<br />
<br />
I had a lot of fun with that and I had my little handy-talkie, talking through it and so forth. I put a bridge to 10 meters so they could talk all around the world there, if they wanted. I published hundreds of articles on repeaters, and a group out in Chicago put their repeater up on the top of the tallest building there, the Sears Tower, and had little receivers all spread around the outskirts of Chicago to pick up the mobile units and the handy-talkies and relay it through the Tower.<br />
<br />
I kept writing in my editorial and said, "Look, I'm able to ski the mountains of New Hampshire, Vermont, and Colorado, and Utah, and make telephone calls anywhere in the world through the local HAM repeater." I said, "Everybody's going to want to do this." Well, Art Householder, K9TRG, out in Chicago, was working for Motorola, and he took my editorials to the top people at Motorola, and he said, "Here," and that's where cell phones started. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Awesome.<br />
<br />
Wayne: But when I started, there were about half-a-dozen clubs with repeaters. By the time I got through publishing articles and a handbook and a list and so forth, there were over 8,000 repeaters around the country in the HAM clubs. I was flying from Johannesburg, South Africa... I was publishing with some computer magazines there, they invited me down.<br />
<br />
I said, "Well, I'll come down if you also include a trip to Swaziland and Lesotho", and they said, "Done." I was flying in a plane they hired for me from South Africa up to Mbanane in Swaziland. I was talking to the HAMs all around South Africa from the plane by way of the repeaters, and all of a sudden the Swaziland repeater came on, and I said, "That's it - we're everywhere." [laughs] Anyway, that's how cell phones got started.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Then, of course, when computers came along, I said, "I think I can...again." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: When you were starting the computer magazines, there was clubs. Were there other computer magazines that you started basing Byte and Kilobaud on? I don't know exactly the timeline of them, what came when, so...but you feel like you were the first.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, I was the first at it. By the time Radio Shack was big, they were going in everywhere. It was getting very popular. They were selling well. [laughs] The programs were coming on, making it so that you could write letters and send email and stuff like that, and the web was developing.<br />
<br />
Bill Gates, I met him first at MITS, when they had the first anniversary of their putting out their Altair 8800. They had a party, and I attended that, and we got asked, "Well, now, what do we do with these things?" The best that anybody could come up with was, "Well, you can use it to program the lawn watering." [laughs] That's all they could think of to do with them at that time. [laughs]<br />
<br />
But anyway, right a few days after Bill Gates started working there, he came in. I think he went to school at Harvard. As a part of a computer class, he did a program in BASIC. When the 8800 came out, there was no software for it at all, nothing, just some little switches on the front. He went down there with his BASIC, and they hired him on.<br />
<br />
IBM was busy with a big lawsuit because they had so dominated the mainframe business. When they finally got through with that, they wanted to get into these microcomputers. By the way, we had...when the minicomputer came along at one-tenth the cost of the mainframe, it put all but IBM out of the mainframe business. They hung on. But the minicomputers...what was it? I'll think of the name anyway...What was the big one? Olsen, DEC, Digital Equipment, and so forth.<br />
<br />
I sat down and had lunch with Olsen. I said, "You've got to start adopting these microcomputers." He said, "Oh, they're just toys. We're not going to be bothered with that." I went over to Data General, which was another big one, and sat down with the president there. He said the same thing, "We're not going to be bothered with that," and on and on.<br />
<br />
I talked to all of the top people in the minicomputer business. Of course, about two or three years later they're all out of business. The microcomputers just dominated everything at one-tenth the cost of a minicomputer. Anytime technology comes along that is one-tenth the cost, it's going to dominate. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: At what point did you realize that computing was going to move from the realm of hobbyist to an actual thing that everyone...?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I don't think there was any time. It just happens. I didn't think about that. I was just busy keeping up, keeping ahead, actually. [laughs] Then Computerworld came along. I got to know Pat McGovern, the head at Computerworld, met him at a conference and so forth. They wanted to buy my magazines and I said, "Well, I've done that. I'll move on." They bought them.<br />
<br />
They didn't put anybody... I think his people got irritated at him making the decision on that. They put not very bright people at the head of each project and all the magazines died.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How many magazines did you sell at that point? Do you know?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I think about five. You have to have somebody who sees the future and gets there first, which I have always done. With compact discs, I noticed that there were six companies making almost 96 percent of all the compact discs, only one of them American the other five were European. I said this is crazy, we've got all these independents out here and they only have four percent of the market.<br />
<br />
We got a group of people to check each CD that an independent put out and tell me what the best cut was on that and I put out samples discs, CDs with 15 different independent samples on it and gave them away totally free except for shipping and handling which paid for everything [laughs] and sold millions of those and the result was that the independent sales went from four percent to 16 percent of the market, over a billion dollars more to them and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You had this advertisement for the indy CD in your magazine?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah. I put out a special journal for the independents of course [laughs] and a special catalog et cetera.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When did you get out of the CD magazine industry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: When it matured. I was never in it as a business, just wanted to make it work. I sold it to IDG where it died, that's the same people that bought my computer magazines. [laughs] But we've got a lot of things we need to change in this country and I've got some good proposals for it.<br />
<br />
The federal government is incredibly bloated, have some over two million people working for the federal government and hiring more all the time. I know how we can cut the government in half in three years, with everybody involved, enthusiastically cooperating. How's that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sounds good!<br />
<br />
Wayne: We've got these stupid wars. We haven't won a war since World War II. We keep getting into them for political reasons and not winning. Like, the Vietnam War, what did we lose, 55,000 Americans over there doing that? You've got nothing.<br />
<br />
We're not getting anything much out of Afghanistan or Iraq now. The only reason we went there was this 9/11 thing which turns out to have been totally fudged. I have a way we can get out of there successfully and win, easily and quickly at almost no expense.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I've looked at your blog and I've read many of your opinions. You seem like an opinionated person, you don't keep them to yourself.<br />
<br />
Wayne: I do my research and I pride myself of not having any beliefs, because a belief prevents you from re-thinking things, or accepting new data. I say "What is the data, what are the facts?" the best I can find them. I have 54 bookshelves full of books that I've read, doing the research, and very, very few novels. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think, for the moment, I'm going to say, I'm...<br />
<br />
Wayne: This is, this is...<br />
<br />
Kevin: I have... That's all the questions that I have for now. I need to assess what we've talked about and see where I have follow up.<br />
<br />
Wayne: This was a long 15 minutes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs] Sorry.<br />
<br />
Wayne: The beard is new, I just grew that just for the hell of it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Looks good. I have mine because my wife went out of town for like a week once, and I just stopped shaving because I'm lazy. She came back, and she said OK, that can stay.<br />
<br />
Wayne: [laughs] Well, I thought I'd see what it grew into.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
Wayne: I [indecipherable 57:21] so I can be Santa Claus.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Well thank you for your time.<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK. Well, as you can tell, I hate talking, and it has to be pried out of me. [laughs] Have fun with your book.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Thanks.<br />
<br />
Wayne: I get a free copy, don't I?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Absolutely, yeah.<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: All right, thanks Wayne.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right-O.</div>Mauryhttps://www.computingpioneers.com/index.php?title=Wayne_Green&diff=189Wayne Green2021-10-19T21:09:46Z<p>Maury: </p>
<hr />
<div>This is a transcript of an audio interview. This transcript may contain errors - if you're using this material for research, etc. please verify with the original recorded interview.<br />
<br />
Source: Floppy Days vintage computing podcast<br />
<br />
Source URL: http://floppydays.libsyn.com/floppy-days-48-kevin-savetz-interviews-wayne-green and https://archive.org/details/WayneGreenInterview<br />
<br />
Interviewer: Kevin Savetz<br />
<br />
Wayne Green was founder of 73 magazine; Byte magazine; Kilobyte, which became Kilobaud, then Kilobaud Microcomputing; 80 Micro magazine for the TRS-80; Hot Coco for the TRS-80 Color Computer; Run for the Commodore 64, inCider magazine for the Apple II; and several other computer magazines. <br />
<br />
This interview took place over Skype on January 29, 2013, when Kevin was doing research for a book about the very first personal computer magazines — Byte, Kilobyte, and Creative Computing. Although he decided not to write the book, he is publishing the interviews. Wayne Green died on September 13, 2013, eight months after this interview.<br />
<br />
----<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wikipedia, which is never wrong, [sarcastically] says you were born in 1922. Is that right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yep. Why sure!<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yep. Why sure! That's New Hampshire for yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was my next question. It says you live in Hancock, New Hampshire.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yep.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Mostly I want to start talking about "Kilobaud," but before we get there, the first magazine you published was "73", is that right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well the first magazine, yeah. I published an extended news journal before that that got to 64 pages and had 2000 subscribers, called "Amateur Radio Frontiers." Then in 1960 I started "73 Magazine" for amateur radio and published that for 43 years. It was always about new HAM technologies.<br />
<br />
This is fun, this is fun, let's do this, let's do this, and so forth and then I ran out of them and I said, "Well, it was never about making money," although it did make a good deal of money, but I've never done anything saying "Hey I can make money." It's always "Someone needs to do this." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent! 73...you stopped at what year?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Two double-O, three.<br />
<br />
Kevin: 2003, OK. You started with that, had you any magazine publishing experience before that?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well just that Amateur Radio Frontiers that's all, and oh, yes, when I did Amateur Radio Frontiers, it started out about radio teletype, M teletype, and that got me a column in "CQ Magazine" one of the 2 HAM magazines, and then I got the editor a better job, he wasn't a HAM, I got him a better job with a new magazine that was starting and they hired me on as editor for five years and I did very nicely, had a wonderful time there so I learned all about publishing.<br />
<br />
Then the publisher, who is not a HAM either, bought a yacht, got overextended and got a year behind on paying my salary, so he fired me. I said, "Well, this is so much fun." I had just enough money to publish the first issue of "73." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wow.<br />
<br />
Wayne: That's how I got into that, but yes, I had experience with publishing with CQ. I knew the advertisers, they knew me, the readers knew me, and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was "Byte" your idea, or how did you get moved from HAM radio into computing?<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK, well, I kept getting more and more articles for 73 on computers by computer hobbyists that were tied in with HAM radio. Then one of my advertisers, MITS, Micro Instrument Telemetry Service, had been advertising with me. They put out a $129 four-banger calculator, adding machine, a little adding pad and so forth.<br />
<br />
All of a sudden, one of the Japanese companies came out with one for about $20, [laughs] and put him out of business. He had been making computers as a hobby, so he put together the Altair 8800 using the 8080 chip from Intel, and put it on the market, and I read about that, and I said, "Ah-hah. I think this is going to be..."<br />
<br />
I thought up a short name for a magazine in the field, and I came up with "Byte," which I thought was right on mark. [laughs] I wrote to all of the companies that were making equipment that the hobbyists were using, and said, "Please send me your mailing lists, the people who have asked for information or that have bought from you." I kept getting shoeboxes full of these names and addresses, and I sent them out, and I was getting a 20 percent response. Now on direct mail, one percent is good. [laughs] I started publishing Byte Magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You wrote to these companies saying, please send me the list of people interested in your products...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right.<br />
<br />
Kevin: ...and then you mailed them about Byte Magazine?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is that right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Now, unfortunately, at that time, I had trouble with the IRS. One of my ad salesmen for 73 made a big mistake and offered a free ad to people who would start advertising with us. Well, immediately my competition told everybody about that and everybody that was advertising wanted a free ad. I had to fire the guy.<br />
<br />
Well he got even by telling the IRS that I was hiding money and the IRS came in and made life miserable. They came in and said, OK all this furniture in your office here that's a personal expense not a business expense, and you've had it for five or seven years so therefore you owe so much a year on that. Oh, this big camera that you're using for your photography, that's a two thousand dollar expense that was personal.<br />
<br />
They did one thing after another and built it up to where I owed about twenty thousand dollars and [laughs] took me to court. [laughs] At any rate, when I started the new magazine the lawyer said, well you better put it in somebody else's name for the time being. I had gotten back together with my first wife, who is now an ex-wife, and we had split up ten years before, and we got back together, and so I put it in her name, big mistake.<br />
<br />
After five issues, the magazine was going great guns and I came back from giving a talk one night and the magazine was gone, everything. All the files [laughs] , everything, was gone.<br />
<br />
Kevin: We're talking file cabinets, and pages laid out, and everything was just...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Everything got moved out, all the back issues and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you think you were robbed? What was your initial thought?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I knew right away what happened. I tried to get in touch with her. She said, "Oh, yes. We took the magazine."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Why do you think that happened? Why did she do that?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Because it was worth a lot of money. She published it for a few issues and then sold it to McGraw-Hill for $7 million dollars. Within a year or so it was billing over $1 million a month in ad sales and it got up to 800 pages a month, magazine. In the meantime I started to put out a magazine called "Kilobyte." and they threatened to sue, so I made it "Kilobaud." Then I put out one called "Desktop Computing", which was in plain English, not computerese, for business men.<br />
<br />
When Apple came out with their... well first I started with the Radio Shack computer, which was the biggest seller. They had 20 percent of the market with their TRS-80. I put out an "80 Micro" magazine. That got to be the third largest magazine in the country at 500 pages a month. [laughs] The reason Radio Shack got into this is because when I first got started with Byte I took the first issue with me down to MITS in Albuquerque.<br />
<br />
Then I stopped off in Fort Worth, Texas and visited an advertiser of mine in 73 who had a radio store there and showed him. I said this is going to be the big future. At any rate, then I went down to San Antonio where they were putting out a keyboard. I got an 8800 computer from MITS, the keyboard from the other place, and I made it work, and I said, "That's it, this is going to be great."<br />
<br />
I started "Byte Magazine," and at any rate the chap that I talked to in Fort Worth closed his store, went to work for Radio Shack, and the next thing I know they had a factory down there making TRS80's, and he was the head of it.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: That's a good gig.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right. But that got to be, as I said 20 percent of the market, and a couple of hundred small companies in there. I put out the magazine for that, and then I put out one for the color computer, called "Hot Cocoa." I put out another one called "Run."<br />
<br />
Kevin: For the Commodore, right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I put out one for the Apple, and I put out one for dealers called Selling Micros, and so forth and I covered the field pretty well. There was a big need for software, so I started Instant Software Company, and I brought a local motel that had 12 offices for me instead of rooms. I took the center part where they had a big restaurant, and made that into a computer lab and got a bunch of computers, and hired on a lot of programmers.<br />
<br />
What I did was have the readers, send in any program that they made, and we would market it for them. Pretty soon, I had a couple of hundred programs on there. I had all kinds, business programs, educational programs, entertainment programs and so forth, and we were the largest software dealer there, in the industry for a while. Anyway, I kept going with that, and finally I said, "Well, done that, [chuckles] done that."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Seems like for a while, you must have had many employees, filling up your 12 offices. How big was your empire?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I had over 250. When I brought the building next door to mine...My building wasn't bad, 40 rooms. The one next door was a little smaller, and then bought the motel, and another building up in North Peter borough for the books that we were putting out, and we put out a lot of books. We had a shipping department out in West Peterborough. [laughs] I don't know I'm like that, we grew and grew.<br />
<br />
Finally, I said, "Well I've done that, and I want to move on." Compact disks have come out, and the industry is ignoring them. The Music Magazines, Hi-Fi Magazines won't have anything to do with them, they say, "Well, we're always going to have LP's, so we don't need a new medium", and I said, "Boloney." First, I sold all my computer magazines to computer world, and got 16 million dollars for that to work with.<br />
<br />
I then started a "CD" review magazine, which within the year, became the largest music magazine, and "CD's" were in. [laughs] I built a studio, I got interested in ragtime. I went to see the movie "The Sting," and they had...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Scott Joplin.<br />
<br />
Wayne: ...this Scott Joplin music there, and I said "Wow, where have I been? How did I miss this?" I'd always been a classical music fan since I was seven years old and was first exposed to it. It was an instant take on classical.<br />
<br />
I was down in New Orleans at a music conference and I was walking along the street with my wife and I heard Scott Joplin music coming out of this bar. I'd been very disappointed, I'd bought every LP I could find on Scott Joplin, and the performers were all mechanical. They didn't feel the music, and I felt it. This guy, Scott Kirby, felt it. I went in and we sat down and had a couple Cokes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: This Scott Kirby guy is playing live in the venue?<br />
<br />
Wayne: He was playing in this bar, and I brought him to New Hampshire and we made a CD of Scott Joplin music and the result was so spectacular that I built us a $100,000 studio, one of the real state-of-the-art. No two walls parallel anywhere, and one wall all mirrors on hinges, with sponge spikes behind. You could vary the liveliness of the room however you wanted it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Bought a huge grand piano and so forth, and like that, so anyway, we put out a whole bunch of CD's.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Hold on a second. [pause] Sorry.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well anyway, that's how computers got started. That was the start of the whole industry was because there was computer hobbyist groups. That's who I was catering to with "Byte" to start with.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I want to go back to a couple of things. First of all, you said you sold all your magazines to Computer World.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You just felt done?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They were humming along. They're probably doing pretty well.<br />
<br />
Wayne: They were doing very well, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You were just bored with it?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah, I had to move on. Yes. Just like with 73, when I ran out of new things, I closed it. With computers, I ran out of new things. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Going back even farther, when your ex-wife took the magazine from you, how did you feel? Did you feel betrayed, or was it just like an opportunity?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, sure. I sued her a little bit and settled for $100,000, which she never paid. That's when it cost me to start it. No big deal. I've never worried about money, never fussed about it. It's not important to me. Getting things done, sharing, is the big deal for me. When I find something fun, interesting, I have to share it. And that's what gets the magazines started and so forth.<br />
<br />
After CDs, I got that going. Then I sold that magazine. The next interest was Cold Fusion. I'd heard about it, and I heard more and more as I investigated. And I went out to a Cold Fusion conference out in...<br />
<br />
Kevin: What year are we talking here?<br />
<br />
Wayne: 1993. I went out to a cold fusion conference on Maui, in the Hawaiian Islands. I went there a little early so I could scuba dive all six islands. As a result of going to that, I decided to start "Cold Fusion" magazine. I hired on Gene Mallove as the editor. He had worked for MIT in their publications department. MIT was one of the early places where they tested cold fusion. They sent out a report saying it didn't work.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was this the nuclear reaction in a coffee cup thing that was...am I thinking of the right thing?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah. I can give you a simple explanation of it. But anyway, Mallove looked into it and he said, "Hey, you fudged these figures." They said, "Shut up. We're getting millions for hot fusion research. Shut the hell up," so he quit. I met him at the conference and hired him on to edit the magazine.<br />
<br />
The magazine took off. Of course, when we got ready to print the fourth issue, I came into the office one day and everything was gone. Everything was cleaned out. He moved up to Maine and put out his own magazine there using all my magazine articles that had been submitted and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: This had to seem familiar?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yes, right. I hired a guy from Vermont who was an expert, but he was in lunatic asylum. I got him out and hired him on. We put out the magazine in reduced form for 28 issues. We published all the scientific papers by the top physicists on exactly how and why this works. Jim Patterson, an inventor down in Sarasota, Florida, demonstrated a cold fusion cell at an energy conference.<br />
<br />
It was about the size of a coffee mug. He had one watt of electricity going in and 1,000 watts of heat coming out for the length of this show. What you do is you take powdered nickel and put it in water. Then you pass electric currents through the water which separates it into hydrogen and oxygen, OK, you with me?<br />
<br />
The hydrogen is absorbed by the nickel which is like a sponge. The Oxygen molecule is too big, and it passes off. Of course, you use the powder so you have the maximum surface area on the Carbon. Pardon me, on the Nickel.<br />
<br />
When it gets 82 percent full of Hydrogen, it begins to combine with the Nickel to make Copper which is the next one up on the Scale of Atomic Weight. There's 0.2 mass left over, that's gone. If you look at Albert Einstein's e=mc^2. Energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light. A tiny but of mass lost is equal to a huge amount of energy which comes off as heat.<br />
<br />
When you get it up to 82 percent it begins generating heat and will generate a lot of heat. What I look forward to is a unit in every building's basement that generates all the heat and the electricity that you can use for almost nothing, less than a thousandth the cost of oil. It uses very little Nickel to generate an awful lot of energy.<br />
<br />
The Department of Energy, no doubt urged by the Oil Industry, and at that time the Bush's were President. They were oil people from way back. The Department of Energy sent out a message to all the colleges and universities, "If you do any research on Cold Fusion on an undergraduate level you get no more money from the government for anything." Then they went to the Patent Office and said, "You're not to even look at patent applications for Cold Fusion."<br />
<br />
Then the head of the Department of Energy put out a book, Zenga, called "Cold Fusion, the Fiasco of the Century." They buried it. There's some science that it's being re-interred if you look at E-cat. Looks like Andrea Rossi may be getting going with it. It is the future, it is the way things are going to go. It has to.<br />
<br />
It's one of three technologies that are going to totally change the world, totally. Not one, the next one is the Takahashi capacitor. If you're into electronics think of a capacitor one inch square, about an eighth of an inch thick that has one farad of capacity.<br />
<br />
Now, we all deal with millions of farad in all of our electronics. I drove scooter all over outer London one day, all day... powered by one of these capacitors, call it a battery, if you will. It was half the size of a Coca-Cola can. We're talking about a battery for cars or any vehicle about the size of a shoebox that will power a car for 500 miles, recharge in a few seconds, and of course your cold fusion is nonpolluting in any way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What's the third item?<br />
<br />
Wayne: The third item, a book came out by Dr. Bruno Comby called Maximize Immunity. He said, "Look, in every research project with dogs, cats, rats, mice and so forth, those fed the standard American diet were getting cancer, heart disease, and other human ailments and those fed raw food weren't. The ones on the American diet were living only half as long."<br />
<br />
They tried some rats and they took three groups of them. One fed raw food. The second fed the American diet. When they got to the age of 60, human age of 60, they did an autopsy to find out how they were.<br />
<br />
The ones on raw food were in perfect shape in every way. Those that survived on the human diet were in terrible shape. Their teeth were bad. Their guts were bad and so forth.<br />
<br />
The third group they put on the American diet with cooked food and when they got to be 30 years old, in the human context, they took them off that diet and put them on raw food. Those that survived that long they autopsied when they got to be the equivalent of 60 and all back in perfect shape again.<br />
<br />
Dr. Bruno Comby, not being real stupid, his hospital in Paris, Institute Comby and you can go to comby.com, Institute Comby. Put his patients on raw food diets and he said he was unable to find any incurable [chime] illnesses, none. Then, a few weeks after reading this, I heard Dr. Lorrain Day on the Art Bell show and she is or was a trauma surgeon in San Francisco and taught in hospitals.<br />
<br />
She got a breast cancer and you go to drday.com and you'll see that breast cancer. She knew that chemotherapy made everybody terribly sick and didn't save any lives, about 97 percent deaths on it. She didn't go that route. It got down to where the cancer went all through her body, and they gave her days to live, gave her last rites, and then she changed to a raw food diet, and total cure.<br />
<br />
Since then, she says she has found no incurable illnesses when you do this. There's a DVD out now, "Rawfor30 Days.com," which shows a group of people with long-term diabetes going on a 30-day raw food regime. At the end of 30 days, they were all totally cured of diabetes...all of them, type two diabetes.<br />
<br />
I said, "OK," and I wrote a book for Americans, since Bruno Comby is French. He did get an American translation. A fellow up in Canada did that for him. But he only had a limited printing of it, so I wrote my book, which went into all that with a lot more details on fluoride and the dangers of that, and so forth.<br />
<br />
That is where we stand, and that's the third one. If the word gets around on that, it's going to put the pharmaceutical industry out of business. That is our most profitable industry in the country. The top 10 pharmaceutical companies make more profits than the other 390 companies on the Forbes 400 list combined. We're talking $3 trillion if you get sick, and nothing if you get healthy...so there's no money in health. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Why don't we get back to...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Best of three. Oh, get back to computers.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Computer magazines.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Serves you right.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sorry. [laughs] You're writing a book about health. I'm writing a book about computer magazines.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well, I knew all the beginners.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sorry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I knew everybody in the field at the beginning.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah? Tell me interesting people you met.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, I don't know. Let's see...well Bill Godbout. He put out Godbout computers for a while.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You went to a lot of conferences, early computer conferences, I assume?<br />
<br />
Wayne: How about Steve Jobs? Maybe you read my thing on that, where I heard about the Apple computer, so my wife and I stopped by to visit him. Took me out...well, first he called Steve Wozniak over, who designed and built the Apple I.<br />
<br />
They took me out to the garage and showed it to me and he said, "What do you think?" I said, "I think you've got a winner." I said, "Up 'til now, all of our computers had a motherboard. You plugged in the processor. You plugged in the memory. You plugged in the communication. You plugged in the keyboard." I said, "You've got it all on one board. That's the way to go."<br />
<br />
Jobs said, "Well, what'll we do?" I said, "Well, there's a first computer conference that's going to be in Atlantic City in two weeks. Be there." He said, "Oh, I can't afford to fly." I said, "Take a bus. Be there." I had my booth there for the magazine and right opposite of me was the Apple booth with Steve Jobs. At the end of show he came over he said, "Wayne! Wayne! I'm in business! I've got 12 orders!" [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent. What was the conference? What was it called?<br />
<br />
Wayne: It was a computer conference for microcomputers. Then a year later I stopped by to visit him and he had a laboratory at that time and I talked with him for a while. I said, "Well, you've got the Apple II here. How are you going to market that?"<br />
<br />
He said, "Well I'm going to sell it direct like we've been doing the Apple I." I said, "Well, we've got some computer stores now. Why don't you sell it through those?" "Oh, they'd take a discount. No, we're not going to do that."<br />
<br />
I said, "Alright, here's what you do first thing Steve, first thing. Hire a marketing manager." He hired a marketing manager, Mark Hula and learned it [laughs] and they sold through stores. The result was a very successful company.<br />
<br />
If I'd been able to get through the wall around Steve Jobs, he'd still be alive. I think he had pancreatic cancer. It's so easy to cure if you change to raw food. I'm 90 doing raw food.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I'm 90 years old and doing raw food. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Seems to be working for you. You had your editorial team, how does a typical issue go together?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, of which? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Let's go with Microcomputing.<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Assuming Kilobaud...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well, whatever. Anyway, the articles would come in and I had an editor for each and we invested in a computer system for setting type. At first you had to set type with linotype and all that stuff in the early days and then finally got computerized. I was right at the beginning of all of those, one of the first adopters.<br />
<br />
I had a whole team of them in my 40 room house there, what had been a bowling alley part of the house we did for production and so forth. We all produced there. Then I added the other buildings, the one next door for the color computer and so forth.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I kept adding more buildings. The books came out of north Peterborough and we put out quite of few books there of software and other things.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Type in software books?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there ever any other negative feedback from advertisers who didn't like how a review came out or wanted things to be written a certain way?<br />
<br />
Wayne: No. I don't recall ever having trouble with advertisers in any way, no. They loved the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Talk about the typical reader of Kilobaud. Was it more of a hobbyist market than some other magazines?<br />
<br />
Wayne: It was all hobby at that time because you had computer clubs around the country and that was what it was.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you read computer magazines today?<br />
<br />
Wayne: No, done that. That's a "Been there, done that," same thing with amateur radio. Without new technologies I lost interest in that. I got interested in that...Well it first started when I was 12 and I went to church one day, to Sunday school. A fellow came in with a box of radio parts and asked my friend Alfie if he was interested and Alfie said, "No." "What about you Wayne?" I said, "You bet!"<br />
<br />
I took them home and there was an article in Popular Mechanics on building a cigar box radio. I had the parts so I built it and I was trapped for life. [laughs] I went into business selling postage stamps to make money for radio parts, always the entrepreneur, I'd buy 50 pound sacks of stamps torn off envelopes and then sell them in five pound lots and did a brisk business with that with ads in the stamp magazines.<br />
<br />
Anyway, that bought me the radio parts. Then I went to high school and they had a radio club and I went there, that's where I learned about amateur radio. Then the next thing you know I got my HAM radio license.<br />
<br />
Again, the forefront in amateur radio at that time was the microwave stuff and VHF. What did I do? I built a little two and half meter walkie-talkie and that was the first rig that I went on the air with when I got my HAM license, walking around town talking to friends on two and a half meters.<br />
<br />
Then of course the war came along so they closed down the HAM bands. I was going to college. I was in my second year at college by that time. I joined the Navy one day before the draft board got me.<br />
<br />
They were yanking me right out of college, so I made a good deal with the Navy on that. The fellow who worked for my dad...My dad was in aviation. He started the first transatlantic airline, American Export Airlines.<br />
<br />
One of the fellows that worked for him was in the reserves and got called back in when the war started and he put me in touch with a fellow who was running the lab, the electronics lab over in Virginia across the river from Washington DC. I went down and visited him, Commander Bourne and he said, "Wow! I want you on my staff."<br />
<br />
I joined the Navy and he said, "Now first we're going to send you to radio school, or electronic school in the Navy here for nine months and then we'll get going here. Let me know when you're out so I can do the papers to get you back here." I went to the electronic school, Radio Material School, graduated on top, number one. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Well I had been a C student all my life. At any rate, when I graduated I had a choice of getting in touch with Commander Bourne and going back to the lab. I said, "No. I'm more dispensable. Let's leave that for somebody with a wife and kids or something."<br />
<br />
I volunteered for submarine duty which was the most dangerous of all, they had the highest loss of any branch of the service because everybody that was in the submarines was on a submarine. They didn't have a large land support. The next thing you know I'm on a submarine, USS Drum, spent five war patrols on that and I've written a book on my adventures there and we were one of the top scoring boats.<br />
<br />
The boat is on display down in Alabama. At Mobile Alabama it's on display there and you can see pictures that I took 70 years ago of the crew and me, [laughs] and so forth. We had some very, very close escapes. I saved the boat personally twice with my fast action.<br />
<br />
I was the radar operator and of course when we were submerged I was on the sonar. Anyway, there's a lot of interesting stories there. After the war I got back into college again and became president of the radio club and I said, "Well golly. We need a radio station here." I started a wire broadcasting station.<br />
<br />
I went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute up in Troy, New York. I started WRPI and we did all kinds of interesting news and shows, plays and so forth, and brought girls in from the local girls' college for the girls' parts. Today, that is the largest student activity, is that radio station which is now an FM station.<br />
<br />
After I got out of college I went to work first for a radio station down in North Carolina. I got fed up with that and had an opportunity. The fellow who introduced me to classical music when I was seven had done an article on my dad's airport. My dad was hired to design and build and operate an airport for Philadelphia.<br />
<br />
He had done a survey for the Department of Commerce on all the airports around the country. He built the first concrete paved runway central airport there. He managed that until he quit and went to work for one of the first airlines, Ludington Airlines, which is owned by Tommy Ludington and Amelia Earhart. Amelia Earhart kept her plane at my dad's airport, the Lockheed, and I used to play in that when I was a kid. He had her over to dinner a number of times. I got to know her.<br />
<br />
I'm one of the few people that knows exactly what happened to her. Her mechanic was a good friend of my dad's. As a matter of fact, you can find on the Web where my dad is in the plane with Don Whemple when he married Ms. Philadelphia. They did it all in the air [laughs] with my dad being there. That made the... I found that on the Web. At any rate... on and on. [laughs] I'll do a book someday...<br />
<br />
Kevin: You should.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Volume one of 10.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well, anyway, that's how computers got started. Before that I did cell phones the same way. I was publishing the HAM magazine and a few HAM clubs put automatic repeaters or relays on top of mountains and tall buildings to extend the range of handy-talkies and mobiles. I said, "Wow, this is fun." I put one up on the local mountain, and it made it so that any mobile HAM anywhere in New England could talk to any other.<br />
<br />
I had a lot of fun with that and I had my little handy-talkie, talking through it and so forth. I put a bridge to 10 meters so they could talk all around the world there, if they wanted. I published hundreds of articles on repeaters, and a group out in Chicago put their repeater up on the top of the tallest building there, the Sears Tower, and had little receivers all spread around the outskirts of Chicago to pick up the mobile units and the handy-talkies and relay it through the Tower.<br />
<br />
I kept writing in my editorial and said, "Look, I'm able to ski the mountains of New Hampshire, Vermont, and Colorado, and Utah, and make telephone calls anywhere in the world through the local HAM repeater." I said, "Everybody's going to want to do this." Well, Art Householder, K9TRG, out in Chicago, was working for Motorola, and he took my editorials to the top people at Motorola, and he said, "Here," and that's where cell phones started. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Awesome.<br />
<br />
Wayne: But when I started, there were about half-a-dozen clubs with repeaters. By the time I got through publishing articles and a handbook and a list and so forth, there were over 8,000 repeaters around the country in the HAM clubs. I was flying from Johannesburg, South Africa... I was publishing with some computer magazines there, they invited me down.<br />
<br />
I said, "Well, I'll come down if you also include a trip to Swaziland and Lesotho", and they said, "Done." I was flying in a plane they hired for me from South Africa up to Mbanane in Swaziland. I was talking to the HAMs all around South Africa from the plane by way of the repeaters, and all of a sudden the Swaziland repeater came on, and I said, "That's it - we're everywhere." [laughs] Anyway, that's how cell phones got started.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Then, of course, when computers came along, I said, "I think I can...again." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: When you were starting the computer magazines, there was clubs. Were there other computer magazines that you started basing Byte and Kilobaud on? I don't know exactly the timeline of them, what came when, so...but you feel like you were the first.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, I was the first at it. By the time Radio Shack was big, they were going in everywhere. It was getting very popular. They were selling well. [laughs] The programs were coming on, making it so that you could write letters and send email and stuff like that, and the web was developing.<br />
<br />
Bill Gates, I met him first at MITS, when they had the first anniversary of their putting out their Altair 8800. They had a party, and I attended that, and we got asked, "Well, now, what do we do with these things?" The best that anybody could come up with was, "Well, you can use it to program the lawn watering." [laughs] That's all they could think of to do with them at that time. [laughs]<br />
<br />
But anyway, right a few days after Bill Gates started working there, he came in. I think he went to school at Harvard. As a part of a computer class, he did a program in BASIC. When the 8800 came out, there was no software for it at all, nothing, just some little switches on the front. He went down there with his BASIC, and they hired him on.<br />
<br />
IBM was busy with a big lawsuit because they had so dominated the mainframe business. When they finally got through with that, they wanted to get into these microcomputers. By the way, we had...when the minicomputer came along at one-tenth the cost of the mainframe, it put all but IBM out of the mainframe business. They hung on. But the minicomputers...what was it? I'll think of the name anyway...What was the big one? Olsen, DEC, Digital Equipment, and so forth.<br />
<br />
I sat down and had lunch with Olsen. I said, "You've got to start adopting these microcomputers." He said, "Oh, they're just toys. We're not going to be bothered with that." I went over to Data General, which was another big one, and sat down with the president there. He said the same thing, "We're not going to be bothered with that," and on and on.<br />
<br />
I talked to all of the top people in the minicomputer business. Of course, about two or three years later they're all out of business. The microcomputers just dominated everything at one-tenth the cost of a minicomputer. Anytime technology comes along that is one-tenth the cost, it's going to dominate. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: At what point did you realize that computing was going to move from the realm of hobbyist to an actual thing that everyone...?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I don't think there was any time. It just happens. I didn't think about that. I was just busy keeping up, keeping ahead, actually. [laughs] Then Computerworld came along. I got to know Pat McGovern, the head at Computerworld, met him at a conference and so forth. They wanted to buy my magazines and I said, "Well, I've done that. I'll move on." They bought them.<br />
<br />
They didn't put anybody...I think his people got irritated at him making the decision on that. They put not very bright people at the head of each project and all the magazines died.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How many magazines did you sell at that point? Do you know?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I think about five. You have to have somebody who sees the future and gets there first, which I have always done. With compact discs, I noticed that there were six companies making almost 96 percent of all the compact discs, only one of them American the other five were European. I said this is crazy, we've got all these independents out here and they only have four percent of the market.<br />
<br />
We got a group of people to check each CD that an independent put out and tell me what the best cut was on that and I put out samples discs, CDs with 15 different independent samples on it and gave them away totally free except for shipping and handling which paid for everything [laughs] and sold millions of those and the result was that the independent sales went from four percent to 16 percent of the market, over a billion dollars more to them and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You had this advertisement for the indy CD in your magazine?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah. I put out a special journal for the independents of course [laughs] and a special catalog et cetera.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When did you get out of the CD magazine industry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: When it matured. I was never in it as a business, just wanted to make it work. I sold it to IDG where it died, that's the same people that bought my computer magazines. [laughs] But we've got a lot of things we need to change in this country and I've got some good proposals for it.<br />
<br />
The federal government is incredibly bloated, have some over two million people working for the federal government and hiring more all the time. I know how we can cut the government in half in three years, with everybody involved, enthusiastically cooperating. How's that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sounds good!<br />
<br />
Wayne: We've got these stupid wars. We haven't won a war since World War II. We keep getting into them for political reasons and not winning. Like, the Vietnam War, what did we lose, 55,000 Americans over there doing that? You've got nothing.<br />
<br />
We're not getting anything much out of Afghanistan or Iraq now. The only reason we went there was this 9/11 thing which turns out to have been totally fudged. I have a way we can get out of there successfully and win, easily and quickly at almost no expense.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I've looked at your blog and I've read many of your opinions. You seem like an opinionated person, you don't keep them to yourself.<br />
<br />
Wayne: I do my research and I pride myself of not having any beliefs, because a belief prevents you from re-thinking things, or accepting new data. I say "What is the data, what are the facts?" the best I can find them. I have 54 bookshelves full of books that I've read, doing the research, and very, very few novels. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think, for the moment, I'm going to say, I'm...<br />
<br />
Wayne: This is, this is...<br />
<br />
Kevin: I have... That's all the questions that I have for now. I need to assess what we've talked about and see where I have follow up.<br />
<br />
Wayne: This was a long 15 minutes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs] Sorry.<br />
<br />
Wayne: The beard is new, I just grew that just for the hell of it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Looks good. I have mine because my wife went out of town for like a week once, and I just stopped shaving because I'm lazy. She came back, and she said OK, that can stay.<br />
<br />
Wayne: [laughs] Well, I thought I'd see what it grew into.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
Wayne: I [indecipherable 57:21] so I can be Santa Claus.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Well thank you for your time.<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK. Well, as you can tell, I hate talking, and it has to be pried out of me. [laughs] Have fun with your book.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Thanks.<br />
<br />
Wayne: I get a free copy, don't I?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Absolutely, yeah.<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: All right, thanks Wayne.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right-O.</div>Mauryhttps://www.computingpioneers.com/index.php?title=Wayne_Green&diff=188Wayne Green2021-10-19T21:09:21Z<p>Maury: </p>
<hr />
<div>This is a transcript of an audio interview. This transcript may contain errors - if you're using this material for research, etc. please verify with the original recorded interview.<br />
<br />
Source: Floppy Days vintage computing podcast<br />
<br />
Source URL: http://floppydays.libsyn.com/floppy-days-48-kevin-savetz-interviews-wayne-green and https://archive.org/details/WayneGreenInterview<br />
<br />
Interviewer: Kevin Savetz<br />
<br />
Wayne Green was founder of 73 magazine; Byte magazine; Kilobyte, which became Kilobaud, then Kilobaud Microcomputing; 80 Micro magazine for the TRS-80; Hot Coco for the TRS-80 Color Computer; Run for the Commodore 64, inCider magazine for the Apple II; and several other computer magazines. <br />
<br />
This interview took place over Skype on January 29, 2013, when Kevin was doing research for a book about the very first personal computer magazines — Byte, Kilobyte, and Creative Computing. Although he decided not to write the book, he is publishing the interviews. Wayne Green died on September 13, 2013, eight months after this interview.<br />
<br />
----<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wikipedia, which is never wrong, [sarcastically] says you were born in 1922. Is that right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yep. Why sure!<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yep. Why sure! That's New Hampshire for yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was my next question. It says you live in Hancock, New Hampshire.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yep.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Mostly I want to start talking about "Kilobaud," but before we get there, the first magazine you published was "73", is that right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well the first magazine, yeah. I published an extended news journal before that that got to 64 pages and had 2000 subscribers, called "Amateur Radio Frontiers." Then in 1960 I started "73 Magazine" for amateur radio and published that for 43 years. It was always about new HAM technologies.<br />
<br />
This is fun, this is fun, let's do this, let's do this, and so forth and then I ran out of them and I said, "Well, it was never about making money," although it did make a good deal of money, but I've never done anything saying "Hey I can make money." It's always "Someone needs to do this." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent! 73...you stopped at what year?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Two double-O, three.<br />
<br />
Kevin: 2003, OK. You started with that, had you any magazine publishing experience before that?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well just that Amateur Radio Frontiers that's all, and oh, yes, when I did Amateur Radio Frontiers, it started out about radio teletype, M teletype, and that got me a column in "CQ Magazine" one of the 2 HAM magazines, and then I got the editor a better job, he wasn't a HAM, I got him a better job with a new magazine that was starting and they hired me on as editor for five years and I did very nicely, had a wonderful time there so I learned all about publishing.<br />
<br />
Then the publisher, who is not a HAM either, bought a yacht, got overextended and got a year behind on paying my salary, so he fired me. I said, "Well, this is so much fun." I had just enough money to publish the first issue of "73." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wow.<br />
<br />
Wayne: That's how I got into that, but yes, I had experience with publishing with CQ. I knew the advertisers, they knew me, the readers knew me, and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was "Byte" your idea, or how did you get moved from HAM radio into computing?<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK, well, I kept getting more and more articles for 73 on computers by computer hobbyists that were tied in with HAM radio. Then one of my advertisers, MITS, Micro Instrument Telemetry Service, had been advertising with me. They put out a $129 four-banger calculator, adding machine, a little adding pad and so forth.<br />
<br />
All of a sudden, one of the Japanese companies came out with one for about $20, [laughs] and put him out of business. He had been making computers as a hobby, so he put together the Altair 8800 using the 8080 chip from Intel, and put it on the market, and I read about that, and I said, "Ah-hah. I think this is going to be..."<br />
<br />
I thought up a short name for a magazine in the field, and I came up with "Byte," which I thought was right on mark. [laughs] I wrote to all of the companies that were making equipment that the hobbyists were using, and said, "Please send me your mailing lists, the people who have asked for information or that have bought from you." I kept getting shoeboxes full of these names and addresses, and I sent them out, and I was getting a 20 percent response. Now on direct mail, one percent is good. [laughs] I started publishing Byte Magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You wrote to these companies saying, please send me the list of people interested in your products...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right.<br />
<br />
Kevin: ...and then you mailed them about Byte Magazine?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is that right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Now, unfortunately, at that time, I had trouble with the IRS. One of my ad salesmen for 73 made a big mistake and offered a free ad to people who would start advertising with us. Well, immediately my competition told everybody about that and everybody that was advertising wanted a free ad. I had to fire the guy.<br />
<br />
Well he got even by telling the IRS that I was hiding money and the IRS came in and made life miserable. They came in and said, OK all this furniture in your office here that's a personal expense not a business expense, and you've had it for five or seven years so therefore you owe so much a year on that. Oh, this big camera that you're using for your photography, that's a two thousand dollar expense that was personal.<br />
<br />
They did one thing after another and built it up to where I owed about twenty thousand dollars and [laughs] took me to court. [laughs] At any rate, when I started the new magazine the lawyer said, well you better put it in somebody else's name for the time being. I had gotten back together with my first wife, who is now an ex-wife, and we had split up ten years before, and we got back together, and so I put it in her name, big mistake.<br />
<br />
After five issues, the magazine was going great guns and I came back from giving a talk one night and the magazine was gone, everything. All the files [laughs] , everything, was gone.<br />
<br />
Kevin: We're talking file cabinets, and pages laid out, and everything was just...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Everything got moved out, all the back issues and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you think you were robbed? What was your initial thought?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I knew right away what happened. I tried to get in touch with her. She said, "Oh, yes. We took the magazine."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Why do you think that happened? Why did she do that?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Because it was worth a lot of money. She published it for a few issues and then sold it to McGraw-Hill for $7 million dollars. Within a year or so it was billing over $1 million a month in ad sales and it got up to 800 pages a month, magazine. In the meantime I started to put out a magazine called "Kilobyte." and they threatened to sue, so I made it "Kilobaud." Then I put out one called "Desktop Computing", which was in plain English, not computerese, for business men.<br />
<br />
When Apple came out with their... well first I started with the Radio Shack computer, which was the biggest seller. They had 20 percent of the market with their TRS-80. I put out an "80 Micro" magazine. That got to be the third largest magazine in the country at 500 pages a month. [laughs] The reason Radio Shack got into this is because when I first got started with Byte I took the first issue with me down to MITS in Albuquerque.<br />
<br />
Then I stopped off in Fort Worth, Texas and visited an advertiser of mine in 73 who had a radio store there and showed him. I said this is going to be the big future. At any rate, then I went down to San Antonio where they were putting out a keyboard. I got an 8800 computer from MITS, the keyboard from the other place, and I made it work, and I said, "That's it, this is going to be great."<br />
<br />
I started "Byte Magazine," and at any rate the chap that I talked to in Fort Worth closed his store, went to work for Radio Shack, and the next thing I know they had a factory down there making TRS80's, and he was the head of it.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: That's a good gig.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right. But that got to be, as I said 20 percent of the market, and a couple of hundred small companies in there. I put out the magazine for that, and then I put out one for the color computer, called "Hot Cocoa." I put out another one called "Run."<br />
<br />
Kevin: For the Commodore, right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I put out one for the Apple, and I put out one for dealers called Selling Micros, and so forth and I covered the field pretty well. There was a big need for software, so I started Instant Software Company, and I brought a local motel that had 12 offices for me instead of rooms. I took the center part where they had a big restaurant, and made that into a computer lab and got a bunch of computers, and hired on a lot of programmers.<br />
<br />
What I did was have the readers, send in any program that they made, and we would market it for them. Pretty soon, I had a couple of hundred programs on there. I had all kinds, business programs, educational programs, entertainment programs and so forth, and we were the largest software dealer there, in the industry for a while. Anyway, I kept going with that, and finally I said, "Well, done that, [chuckles] done that."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Seems like for a while, you must have had many employees, filling up your 12 offices. How big was your empire?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I had over 250. When I brought the building next door to mine...My building wasn't bad, 40 rooms. The one next door was a little smaller, and then bought the motel, and another building up in North Peter borough for the books that we were putting out, and we put out a lot of books. We had a shipping department out in West Peterborough. [laughs] I don't know I'm like that, we grew and grew.<br />
<br />
Finally, I said, "Well I've done that, and I want to move on." Compact disks have come out, and the industry is ignoring them. The Music Magazines, Hi-Fi Magazines won't have anything to do with them, they say, "Well, we're always going to have LP's, so we don't need a new medium", and I said, "Boloney." First, I sold all my computer magazines to computer world, and got 16 million dollars for that to work with.<br />
<br />
I then started a "CD" review magazine, which within the year, became the largest music magazine, and "CD's" were in. [laughs] I built a studio, I got interested in ragtime. I went to see the movie "The Sting," and they had...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Scott Joplin.<br />
<br />
Wayne: ...this Scott Joplin music there, and I said "Wow, where have I been? How did I miss this?" I'd always been a classical music fan since I was seven years old and was first exposed to it. It was an instant take on classical.<br />
<br />
I was down in New Orleans at a music conference and I was walking along the street with my wife and I heard Scott Joplin music coming out of this bar. I'd been very disappointed, I'd bought every LP I could find on Scott Joplin, and the performers were all mechanical. They didn't feel the music, and I felt it. This guy, Scott Kirby, felt it. I went in and we sat down and had a couple Cokes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: This Scott Kirby guy is playing live in the venue?<br />
<br />
Wayne: He was playing in this bar, and I brought him to New Hampshire and we made a CD of Scott Joplin music and the result was so spectacular that I built us a $100,000 studio, one of the real state-of-the-art. No two walls parallel anywhere, and one wall all mirrors on hinges, with sponge spikes behind. You could vary the liveliness of the room however you wanted it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Bought a huge grand piano and so forth, and like that, so anyway, we put out a whole bunch of CD's.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Hold on a second. [pause] Sorry.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well anyway, that's how computers got started. That was the start of the whole industry was because there was computer hobbyist groups. That's who I was catering to with "Byte" to start with.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I want to go back to a couple of things. First of all, you said you sold all your magazines to Computer World.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You just felt done?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They were humming along. They're probably doing pretty well.<br />
<br />
Wayne: They were doing very well, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You were just bored with it?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah, I had to move on. Yes. Just like with 73, when I ran out of new things, I closed it. With computers, I ran out of new things. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Going back even farther, when your ex-wife took the magazine from you, how did you feel? Did you feel betrayed, or was it just like an opportunity?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, sure. I sued her a little bit and settled for $100,000, which she never paid. That's when it cost me to start it. No big deal. I've never worried about money, never fussed about it. It's not important to me. Getting things done, sharing, is the big deal for me. When I find something fun, interesting, I have to share it. And that's what gets the magazines started and so forth.<br />
<br />
After CDs, I got that going. Then I sold that magazine. The next interest was Cold Fusion. I'd heard about it, and I heard more and more as I investigated. And I went out to a Cold Fusion conference out in...<br />
<br />
Kevin: What year are we talking here?<br />
<br />
Wayne: 1993. I went out to a cold fusion conference on Maui, in the Hawaiian Islands. I went there a little early so I could scuba dive all six islands. As a result of going to that, I decided to start "Cold Fusion" magazine. I hired on Gene Mallove as the editor. He had worked for MIT in their publications department. MIT was one of the early places where they tested cold fusion. They sent out a report saying it didn't work.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was this the nuclear reaction in a coffee cup thing that was...am I thinking of the right thing?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah. I can give you a simple explanation of it. But anyway, Mallove looked into it and he said, "Hey, you fudged these figures." They said, "Shut up. We're getting millions for hot fusion research. Shut the hell up," so he quit. I met him at the conference and hired him on to edit the magazine.<br />
<br />
The magazine took off. Of course, when we got ready to print the fourth issue, I came into the office one day and everything was gone. Everything was cleaned out. He moved up to Maine and put out his own magazine there using all my magazine articles that had been submitted and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: This had to seem familiar?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yes, right. I hired a guy from Vermont who was an expert, but he was in lunatic asylum. I got him out and hired him on. We put out the magazine in reduced form for 28 issues. We published all the scientific papers by the top physicists on exactly how and why this works. Jim Patterson, an inventor down in Sarasota, Florida, demonstrated a cold fusion cell at an energy conference.<br />
<br />
It was about the size of a coffee mug. He had one watt of electricity going in and 1,000 watts of heat coming out for the length of this show. What you do is you take powdered nickel and put it in water. Then you pass electric currents through the water which separates it into hydrogen and oxygen, OK, you with me?<br />
<br />
The hydrogen is absorbed by the nickel which is like a sponge. The Oxygen molecule is too big, and it passes off. Of course, you use the powder so you have the maximum surface area on the Carbon. Pardon me, on the Nickel.<br />
<br />
When it gets 82 percent full of Hydrogen, it begins to combine with the Nickel to make Copper which is the next one up on the Scale of Atomic Weight. There's 0.2 mass left over, that's gone. If you look at Albert Einstein's e=mc^2. Energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light. A tiny but of mass lost is equal to a huge amount of energy which comes off as heat.<br />
<br />
When you get it up to 82 percent it begins generating heat and will generate a lot of heat. What I look forward to is a unit in every building's basement that generates all the heat and the electricity that you can use for almost nothing, less than a thousandth the cost of oil. It uses very little Nickel to generate an awful lot of energy.<br />
<br />
The Department of Energy, no doubt urged by the Oil Industry, and at that time the Bush's were President. They were oil people from way back. The Department of Energy sent out a message to all the colleges and universities, "If you do any research on Cold Fusion on an undergraduate level you get no more money from the government for anything." Then they went to the Patent Office and said, "You're not to even look at patent applications for Cold Fusion."<br />
<br />
Then the head of the Department of Energy put out a book, Zenga, called "Cold Fusion, the Fiasco of the Century." They buried it. There's some science that it's being re-interred if you look at E-cat. Looks like Andrea Rossi may be getting going with it. It is the future, it is the way things are going to go. It has to.<br />
<br />
It's one of three technologies that are going to totally change the world, totally. Not one, the next one is the Takahashi capacitor. If you're into electronics think of a capacitor one inch square, about an eighth of an inch thick that has one farad of capacity.<br />
<br />
Now, we all deal with millions of farad in all of our electronics. I drove scooter all over outer London one day, all day... powered by one of these capacitors, call it a battery, if you will. It was half the size of a Coca-Cola can. We're talking about a battery for cars or any vehicle about the size of a shoebox that will power a car for 500 miles, recharge in a few seconds, and of course your cold fusion is nonpolluting in any way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What's the third item?<br />
<br />
Wayne: The third item, a book came out by Dr. Bruno Comby called Maximize Immunity. He said, "Look, in every research project with dogs, cats, rats, mice and so forth, those fed the standard American diet were getting cancer, heart disease, and other human ailments and those fed raw food weren't. The ones on the American diet were living only half as long."<br />
<br />
They tried some rats and they took three groups of them. One fed raw food. The second fed the American diet. When they got to the age of 60, human age of 60, they did an autopsy to find out how they were.<br />
<br />
The ones on raw food were in perfect shape in every way. Those that survived on the human diet were in terrible shape. Their teeth were bad. Their guts were bad and so forth.<br />
<br />
The third group they put on the American diet with cooked food and when they got to be 30 years old, in the human context, they took them off that diet and put them on raw food. Those that survived that long they autopsied when they got to be the equivalent of 60 and all back in perfect shape again.<br />
<br />
Dr. Bruno Comby, not being real stupid, his hospital in Paris, Institute Comby and you can go to comby.com, Institute Comby. Put his patients on raw food diets and he said he was unable to find any incurable [chime] illnesses, none. Then, a few weeks after reading this, I heard Dr. Lorrain Day on the Art Bell show and she is or was a trauma surgeon in San Francisco and taught in hospitals.<br />
<br />
She got a breast cancer and you go to drday.com and you'll see that breast cancer. She knew that chemotherapy made everybody terribly sick and didn't save any lives, about 97 percent deaths on it. She didn't go that route. It got down to where the cancer went all through her body, and they gave her days to live, gave her last rites, and then she changed to a raw food diet, and total cure.<br />
<br />
Since then, she says she has found no incurable illnesses when you do this. There's a DVD out now, "Rawfor30 Days.com," which shows a group of people with long-term diabetes going on a 30-day raw food regime. At the end of 30 days, they were all totally cured of diabetes...all of them, type two diabetes.<br />
<br />
I said, "OK," and I wrote a book for Americans, since Bruno Comby is French. He did get an American translation. A fellow up in Canada did that for him. But he only had a limited printing of it, so I wrote my book, which went into all that with a lot more details on fluoride and the dangers of that, and so forth.<br />
<br />
That is where we stand, and that's the third one. If the word gets around on that, it's going to put the pharmaceutical industry out of business. That is our most profitable industry in the country. The top 10 pharmaceutical companies make more profits than the other 390 companies on the Forbes 400 list combined. We're talking $3 trillion if you get sick, and nothing if you get healthy...so there's no money in health. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Why don't we get back to...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Best of three. Oh, get back to computers.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Computer magazines.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Serves you right.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sorry. [laughs] You're writing a book about health. I'm writing a book about computer magazines.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well, I knew all the beginners.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sorry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I knew everybody in the field at the beginning.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah? Tell me interesting people you met.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, I don't know. Let's see...well Bill Godbout. He put out Godbout computers for a while.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You went to a lot of conferences, early computer conferences, I assume?<br />
<br />
Wayne: How about Steve Jobs? Maybe you read my thing on that, where I heard about the Apple computer, so my wife and I stopped by to visit him. Took me out...well, first he called Steve Wozniak over, who designed and built the Apple I.<br />
<br />
They took me out to the garage and showed it to me and he said, "What do you think?" I said, "I think you've got a winner." I said, "Up 'til now, all of our computers had a motherboard. You plugged in the processor. You plugged in the memory. You plugged in the communication. You plugged in the keyboard." I said, "You've got it all on one board. That's the way to go."<br />
<br />
Jobs said, "Well, what'll we do?" I said, "Well, there's a first computer conference that's going to be in Atlantic City in two weeks. Be there." He said, "Oh, I can't afford to fly." I said, "Take a bus. Be there." I had my booth there for the magazine and right opposite of me was the Apple booth with Steve Jobs. At the end of show he came over he said, "Wayne! Wayne! I'm in business! I've got 12 orders!" [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent. What was the conference? What was it called?<br />
<br />
Wayne: It was a computer conference for microcomputers. Then a year later I stopped by to visit him and he had a laboratory at that time and I talked with him for a while. I said, "Well, you've got the Apple II here. How are you going to market that?"<br />
<br />
He said, "Well I'm going to sell it direct like we've been doing the Apple I." I said, "Well, we've got some computer stores now. Why don't you sell it through those?" "Oh, they'd take a discount. No, we're not going to do that."<br />
<br />
I said, "Alright, here's what you do first thing Steve, first thing. Hire a marketing manager." He hired a marketing manager, Mark Hula and learned it [laughs] and they sold through stores. The result was a very successful company.<br />
<br />
If I'd been able to get through the wall around Steve Jobs, he'd still be alive. I think he had pancreatic cancer. It's so easy to cure if you change to raw food. I'm 90 doing raw food.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I'm 90 years old and doing raw food. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Seems to be working for you. You had your editorial team, how does a typical issue go together?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, of which? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Let's go with Microcomputing.<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Assuming Kilobaud...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well, whatever. Anyway, the articles would come in and I had an editor for each and we invested in a computer system for setting type. At first you had to set type with linotype and all that stuff in the early days and then finally got computerized. I was right at the beginning of all of those, one of the first adopters.<br />
<br />
I had a whole team of them in my 40 room house there, what had been a bowling alley part of the house we did for production and so forth. We all produced there. Then I added the other buildings, the one next door for the color computer and so forth.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I kept adding more buildings. The books came out of north Peterborough and we put out quite of few books there of software and other things.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Type in software books?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there ever any other negative feedback from advertisers who didn't like how a review came out or wanted things to be written a certain way?<br />
<br />
Wayne: No. I don't recall ever having trouble with advertisers in any way, no. They loved the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Talk about the typical reader of Kilobaud. Was it more of a hobbyist market than some other magazines?<br />
<br />
Wayne: It was all hobby at that time because you had computer clubs around the country and that was what it was.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you read computer magazines today?<br />
<br />
Wayne: No, done that. That's a "Been there, done that," same thing with amateur radio. Without new technologies I lost interest in that. I got interested in that...Well it first started when I was 12 and I went to church one day, to Sunday school. A fellow came in with a box of radio parts and asked my friend Alfie if he was interested and Alfie said, "No." "What about you Wayne?" I said, "You bet!"<br />
<br />
I took them home and there was an article in Popular Mechanics on building a cigar box radio. I had the parts so I built it and I was trapped for life. [laughs] I went into business selling postage stamps to make money for radio parts, always the entrepreneur, I'd buy 50 pound sacks of stamps torn off envelopes and then sell them in five pound lots and did a brisk business with that with ads in the stamp magazines.<br />
<br />
Anyway, that bought me the radio parts. Then I went to high school and they had a radio club and I went there, that's where I learned about amateur radio. Then the next thing you know I got my HAM radio license.<br />
<br />
Again, the forefront in amateur radio at that time was the microwave stuff and VHF. What did I do? I built a little two and half meter walkie-talkie and that was the first rig that I went on the air with when I got my HAM license, walking around town talking to friends on two and a half meters.<br />
<br />
Then of course the war came along so they closed down the HAM bands. I was going to college. I was in my second year at college by that time. I joined the Navy one day before the draft board got me.<br />
<br />
They were yanking me right out of college, so I made a good deal with the Navy on that. The fellow who worked for my dad...My dad was in aviation. He started the first transatlantic airline, American Export Airlines.<br />
<br />
One of the fellows that worked for him was in the reserves and got called back in when the war started and he put me in touch with a fellow who was running the lab, the electronics lab over in Virginia across the river from Washington DC. I went down and visited him, Commander Bourne and he said, "Wow! I want you on my staff."<br />
<br />
I joined the Navy and he said, "Now first we're going to send you to radio school, or electronic school in the Navy here for nine months and then we'll get going here. Let me know when you're out so I can do the papers to get you back here." I went to the electronic school, Radio Material School, graduated on top, number one. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Well I had been a C student all my life. At any rate, when I graduated I had a choice of getting in touch with Commander Bourne and going back to the lab. I said, "No. I'm more dispensable. Let's leave that for somebody with a wife and kids or something."<br />
<br />
I volunteered for submarine duty which was the most dangerous of all, they had the highest loss of any branch of the service because everybody that was in the submarines was on a submarine. They didn't have a large land support. The next thing you know I'm on a submarine, USS Drum, spent five war patrols on that and I've written a book on my adventures there and we were one of the top scoring boats.<br />
<br />
The boat is on display down in Alabama. At Mobile Alabama it's on display there and you can see pictures that I took 70 years ago of the crew and me, [laughs] and so forth. We had some very, very close escapes. I saved the boat personally twice with my fast action.<br />
<br />
I was the radar operator and of course when we were submerged I was on the sonar. Anyway, there's a lot of interesting stories there. After the war I got back into college again and became president of the radio club and I said, "Well golly. We need a radio station here." I started a wire broadcasting station.<br />
<br />
I went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute up in Troy, New York. I started WRPI and we did all kinds of interesting news and shows, plays and so forth, and brought girls in from the local girls' college for the girls' parts. Today, that is the largest student activity, is that radio station which is now an FM station.<br />
<br />
After I got out of college I went to work first for a radio station down in North Carolina. I got fed up with that and had an opportunity. The fellow who introduced me to classical music when I was seven had done an article on my dad's airport. My dad was hired to design and build and operate an airport for Philadelphia.<br />
<br />
He had done a survey for the Department of Commerce on all the airports around the country. He built the first concrete paved runway central airport there. He managed that until he quit and went to work for one of the first airlines, Ludington Airlines, which is owned by Tommy Ludington and Amelia Earhart. Amelia Earhart kept her plane at my dad's airport, the Lockheed, and I used to play in that when I was a kid. He had her over to dinner a number of times. I got to know her.<br />
<br />
I'm one of the few people that knows exactly what happened to her. Her mechanic was a good friend of my dad's. As a matter of fact, you can find on the Web where my dad is in the plane with Don Whemple when he married Ms. Philadelphia. They did it all in the air [laughs] with my dad being there. That made the... I found that on the Web. At any rate... on and on. [laughs] I'll do a book someday...<br />
<br />
Kevin: You should.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Volume one of 10.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well, anyway, that's how computers got started. Before that I did cell phones the same way. I was publishing the HAM magazine and a few HAM clubs put automatic repeaters or relays on top of mountains and tall buildings to extend the range of handy-talkies and mobiles. I said, "Wow, this is fun." I put one up on the local mountain, and it made it so that any mobile HAM anywhere in New England could talk to any other.<br />
<br />
I had a lot of fun with that and I had my little handy-talkie, talking through it and so forth. I put a bridge to 10 meters so they could talk all around the world there, if they wanted. I published hundreds of articles on repeaters, and a group out in Chicago put their repeater up on the top of the tallest building there, the Sears Tower, and had little receivers all spread around the outskirts of Chicago to pick up the mobile units and the handy-talkies and relay it through the Tower.<br />
<br />
I kept writing in my editorial and said, "Look, I'm able to ski the mountains of New Hampshire, Vermont, and Colorado, and Utah, and make telephone calls anywhere in the world through the local HAM repeater." I said, "Everybody's going to want to do this." Well, Art Householder, K9TRG, out in Chicago, was working for Motorola, and he took my editorials to the top people at Motorola, and he said, "Here," and that's where cell phones started. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Awesome.<br />
<br />
Wayne: But when I started, there were about half-a-dozen clubs with repeaters. By the time I got through publishing articles and a handbook and a list and so forth, there were over 8,000 repeaters around the country in the HAM clubs. I was flying from Johannesburg, South Africa... I was publishing with some computer magazines there, they invited me down.<br />
<br />
I said, "Well, I'll come down if you also include a trip to Swaziland and Lesotho", and they said, "Done." I was flying in a plane they hired for me from South Africa up to Mbanane in Swaziland. I was talking to the HAMs all around South Africa from the plane by way of the repeaters, and all of a sudden the Swaziland repeater came on, and I said, "That's it - we're everywhere." [laughs] Anyway, that's how cell phones got started.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Then, of course, when computers came along, I said, "I think I can...again." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: When you were starting the computer magazines, there was clubs. Were there other computer magazines that you started basing Byte and Kilobaud on? I don't know exactly the timeline of them, what came when, so...but you feel like you were the first.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, I was the first at it. By the time Radio Shack was big, they were going in everywhere. It was getting very popular. They were selling well. [laughs] The programs were coming on, making it so that you could write letters and send email and stuff like that, and the web was developing.<br />
<br />
Bill Gates, I met him first at MITS, when they had the first anniversary of their putting out their Altair 8800. They had a party, and I attended that, and we got asked, "Well, now, what do we do with these things?" The best that anybody could come up with was, "Well, you can use it to program the lawn watering." [laughs] That's all they could think of to do with them at that time. [laughs]<br />
<br />
But anyway, right a few days after Bill Gates started working there, he came in. I think he went to school at Harvard. As a part of a computer class, he did a program in BASIC. When the 8800 came out, there was no software for it at all, nothing, just some little switches on the front. He went down there with his BASIC, and they hired him on.<br />
<br />
IBM was busy with a big lawsuit because they had so dominated the mainframe business. When they finally got through with that, they wanted to get into these microcomputers. By the way, we had...when the minicomputer came along at one-tenth the cost of the mainframe, it put all but IBM out of the mainframe business. They hung on. But the minicomputers...what was it? I'll think of the name anyway...What was the big one? Olsen, DEC, Digital Equipment, and so forth.<br />
<br />
I sat down and had lunch with Olsen. I said, "You've got to start adopting these microcomputers." He said, "Oh, they're just toys. We're not going to be bothered with that." I went over to Data General, which was another big one, and sat down with the president there. He said the same thing, "We're not going to be bothered with that," and on and on.<br />
<br />
I talked to all of the top people in the minicomputer business. Of course, about two or three years later they're all out of business. The microcomputers just dominated everything at one-tenth the cost of a minicomputer. Anytime technology comes along that is one-tenth the cost, it's going to dominate. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: At what point did you realize that computing was going to move from the realm of hobbyist to an actual thing that everyone...?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I don't think there was any time. It just happens. I didn't think about that. I was just busy keeping up, keeping ahead, actually. [laughs] Then Computerworld came along. I got to know Pat McGovern, the head at Computerworld, met him at a conference and so forth. They wanted to buy my magazines and I said, "Well, I've done that. I'll move on." They bought them.<br />
<br />
They didn't put anybody...I think his people got irritated at him making the decision on that. They put not very bright people at the head of each project and all the magazines died.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How many magazines did you sell at that point? Do you know?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I think about five. You have to have somebody who sees the future and gets there first, which I have always done. With compact discs, I noticed that there were six companies making almost 96 percent of all the compact discs, only one of them American the other five were European. I said this is crazy, we've got all these independents out here and they only have four percent of the market.<br />
<br />
We got a group of people to check each CD that an independent put out and tell me what the best cut was on that and I put out samples discs, CDs with 15 different independent samples on it and gave them away totally free except for shipping and handling which paid for everything [laughs] and sold millions of those and the result was that the independent sales went from four percent to 16 percent of the market, over a billion dollars more to them and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You had this advertisement for the indy CD in your magazine?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah. I put out a special journal for the independents of course [laughs] and a special catalog et cetera.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When did you get out of the CD magazine industry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: When it matured. I was never in it as a business, just wanted to make it work. I sold it to IDG where it died, that's the same people that bought my computer magazines. [laughs] But we've got a lot of things we need to change in this country and I've got some good proposals for it.<br />
<br />
The federal government is incredibly bloated, have some over two million people working for the federal government and hiring more all the time. I know how we can cut the government in half in three years, with everybody involved, enthusiastically cooperating. How's that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sounds good!<br />
<br />
Wayne: We've got these stupid wars. We haven't won a war since World War II. We keep getting into them for political reasons and not winning. Like, the Vietnam War, what did we lose, 55,000 Americans over there doing that? You've got nothing.<br />
<br />
We're not getting anything much out of Afghanistan or Iraq now. The only reason we went there was this 9/11 thing which turns out to have been totally fudged. I have a way we can get out of there successfully and win, easily and quickly at almost no expense.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I've looked at your blog and I've read many of your opinions. You seem like an opinionated person, you don't keep them to yourself.<br />
<br />
Wayne: I do my research and I pride myself of not having any beliefs, because a belief prevents you from re-thinking things, or accepting new data. I say "What is the data, what are the facts?" the best I can find them. I have 54 bookshelves full of books that I've read, doing the research, and very, very few novels. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think, for the moment, I'm going to say, I'm...<br />
<br />
Wayne: This is, this is...<br />
<br />
Kevin: I have... That's all the questions that I have for now. I need to assess what we've talked about and see where I have follow up.<br />
<br />
Wayne: This was a long 15 minutes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs] Sorry.<br />
<br />
Wayne: The beard is new, I just grew that just for the hell of it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Looks good. I have mine because my wife went out of town for like a week once, and I just stopped shaving because I'm lazy. She came back, and she said OK, that can stay.<br />
<br />
Wayne: [laughs] Well, I thought I'd see what it grew into.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
Wayne: I [indecipherable 57:21] so I can be Santa Claus.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Well thank you for your time.<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK. Well, as you can tell, I hate talking, and it has to be pried out of me. [laughs] Have fun with your book.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Thanks.<br />
<br />
Wayne: I get a free copy, don't I?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Absolutely, yeah.<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: All right, thanks Wayne.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right-O.</div>Mauryhttps://www.computingpioneers.com/index.php?title=Wayne_Green&diff=187Wayne Green2021-10-19T21:08:29Z<p>Maury: wikified, most indecipherable bits deciphered, only one remains and seems to be a dropout in the audio</p>
<hr />
<div>This is a transcript of an audio interview. This transcript may contain errors - if you're using this material for research, etc. please verify with the original recorded interview.<br />
<br />
Source: Floppy Days vintage computing podcast<br />
<br />
Source URL: http://floppydays.libsyn.com/floppy-days-48-kevin-savetz-interviews-wayne-green and https://archive.org/details/WayneGreenInterview<br />
<br />
Interviewer: Kevin Savetz<br />
<br />
Wayne Green was founder of 73 magazine; Byte magazine; Kilobyte, which became Kilobaud, then Kilobaud Microcomputing; 80 Micro magazine for the TRS-80; Hot Coco for the TRS-80 Color Computer; Run for the Commodore 64, inCider magazine for the Apple II; and several other computer magazines. <br />
<br />
This interview took place over Skype on January 29, 2013, when Kevin was doing research for a book about the very first personal computer magazines — Byte, Kilobyte, and Creative Computing. Although he decided not to write the book, he is publishing the interviews. Wayne Green died on September 13, 2013, eight months after this interview.<br />
<br />
----<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wikipedia, which is never wrong, [sarcastically] says you were born in 1922. Is that right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yep. Why sure!<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yep. Why sure! That's New Hampshire for yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was my next question. It says you live in Hancock, New Hampshire.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yep.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Mostly I want to start talking about "Kilobaud," but before we get there, the first magazine you published was "73", is that right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well the first magazine, yeah. I published an extended news journal before that that got to 64 pages and had 2000 subscribers, called "Amateur Radio Frontiers." Then in 1960 I started "73 Magazine" for amateur radio and published that for 43 years. It was always about new HAM technologies.<br />
<br />
This is fun, this is fun, let's do this, let's do this, and so forth and then I ran out of them and I said, "Well, it was never about making money," although it did make a good deal of money, but I've never done anything saying "Hey I can make money." It's always "Someone needs to do this." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent! 73...you stopped at what year?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Two double-O, three.<br />
<br />
Kevin: 2003, OK. You started with that, had you any magazine publishing experience before that?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well just that Amateur Radio Frontiers that's all, and oh, yes, when I did Amateur Radio Frontiers, it started out about radio teletype, M teletype, and that got me a column in "CQ Magazine" one of the 2 HAM magazines, and then I got the editor a better job, he wasn't a HAM, I got him a better job with a new magazine that was starting and they hired me on as editor for five years and I did very nicely, had a wonderful time there so I learned all about publishing.<br />
<br />
Then the publisher, who is not a HAM either, bought a yacht, got overextended and got a year behind on paying my salary, so he fired me. I said, "Well, this is so much fun." I had just enough money to publish the first issue of "73." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wow.<br />
<br />
Wayne: That's how I got into that, but yes, I had experience with publishing with CQ. I knew the advertisers, they knew me, the readers knew me, and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was "Byte" your idea, or how did you get moved from HAM radio into computing?<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK, well, I kept getting more and more articles for 73 on computers by computer hobbyists that were tied in with HAM radio. Then one of my advertisers, MITS, Micro Instrument Telemetry Service, had been advertising with me. They put out a $129 four-banger calculator, adding machine, a little adding pad and so forth.<br />
<br />
All of a sudden, one of the Japanese companies came out with one for about $20, [laughs] and put him out of business. He had been making computers as a hobby, so he put together the Altair 8800 using the 8080 chip from Intel, and put it on the market, and I read about that, and I said, "Ah-hah. I think this is going to be..."<br />
<br />
I thought up a short name for a magazine in the field, and I came up with "Byte," which I thought was right on mark. [laughs] I wrote to all of the companies that were making equipment that the hobbyists were using, and said, "Please send me your mailing lists, the people who have asked for information or that have bought from you." I kept getting shoeboxes full of these names and addresses, and I sent them out, and I was getting a 20 percent response. Now on direct mail, one percent is good. [laughs] I started publishing Byte Magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You wrote to these companies saying, please send me the list of people interested in your products...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right.<br />
<br />
Kevin: ...and then you mailed them about Byte Magazine?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is that right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Now, unfortunately, at that time, I had trouble with the IRS. One of my ad salesmen for 73 made a big mistake and offered a free ad to people who would start advertising with us. Well, immediately my competition told everybody about that and everybody that was advertising wanted a free ad. I had to fire the guy.<br />
<br />
Well he got even by telling the IRS that I was hiding money and the IRS came in and made life miserable. They came in and said, OK all this furniture in your office here that's a personal expense not a business expense, and you've had it for five or seven years so therefore you owe so much a year on that. Oh, this big camera that you're using for your photography, that's a two thousand dollar expense that was personal.<br />
<br />
They did one thing after another and built it up to where I owed about twenty thousand dollars and [laughs] took me to court. [laughs] At any rate, when I started the new magazine the lawyer said, well you better put it in somebody else's name for the time being. I had gotten back together with my first wife, who is now an ex-wife, and we had split up ten years before, and we got back together, and so I put it in her name, big mistake.<br />
<br />
After five issues, the magazine was going great guns and I came back from giving a talk one night and the magazine was gone, everything. All the files [laughs] , everything, was gone.<br />
<br />
Kevin: We're talking file cabinets, and pages laid out, and everything was just...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Everything got moved out, all the back issues and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you think you were robbed? What was your initial thought?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I knew right away what happened. I tried to get in touch with her. She said, "Oh, yes. We took the magazine."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Why do you think that happened? Why did she do that?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Because it was worth a lot of money. She published it for a few issues and then sold it to McGraw-Hill for $7 million dollars. Within a year or so it was billing over $1 million a month in ad sales and it got up to 800 pages a month, magazine. In the meantime I started to put out a magazine called "Kilobyte." and they threatened to sue, so I made it "Kilobaud." Then I put out one called "Desktop Computing", which was in plain English, not computerese, for business men.<br />
<br />
When Apple came out with their... well first I started with the Radio Shack computer, which was the biggest seller. They had 20 percent of the market with their TRS-80. I put out an "80 Micro" magazine. That got to be the third largest magazine in the country at 500 pages a month. [laughs] The reason Radio Shack got into this is because when I first got started with Byte I took the first issue with me down to MITS in Albuquerque.<br />
<br />
Then I stopped off in Fort Worth, Texas and visited an advertiser of mine in 73 who had a radio store there and showed him. I said this is going to be the big future. At any rate, then I went down to San Antonio where they were putting out a keyboard. I got an 8800 computer from MITS, the keyboard from the other place, and I made it work, and I said, "That's it, this is going to be great."<br />
<br />
I started "Byte Magazine," and at any rate the chap that I talked to in Fort Worth closed his store, went to work for Radio Shack, and the next thing I know they had a factory down there making TRS80's, and he was the head of it.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: That's a good gig.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right. But that got to be, as I said 20 percent of the market, and a couple of hundred small companies in there. I put out the magazine for that, and then I put out one for the color computer, called "Hot Cocoa." I put out another one called "Run."<br />
<br />
Kevin: For the Commodore, right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I put out one for the Apple, and I put out one for dealers called Selling Micros, and so forth and I covered the field pretty well. There was a big need for software, so I started Instant Software Company, and I brought a local motel that had 12 offices for me instead of rooms. I took the center part where they had a big restaurant, and made that into a computer lab and got a bunch of computers, and hired on a lot of programmers.<br />
<br />
What I did was have the readers, send in any program that they made, and we would market it for them. Pretty soon, I had a couple of hundred programs on there. I had all kinds, business programs, educational programs, entertainment programs and so forth, and we were the largest software dealer there, in the industry for a while. Anyway, I kept going with that, and finally I said, "Well, done that, [chuckles] done that."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Seems like for a while, you must have had many employees, filling up your 12 offices. How big was your empire?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I had over 250. When I brought the building next door to mine...My building wasn't bad, 40 rooms. The one next door was a little smaller, and then bought the motel, and another building up in North Peter borough for the books that we were putting out, and we put out a lot of books. We had a shipping department out in West Peterborough. [laughs] I don't know I'm like that, we grew and grew.<br />
<br />
Finally, I said, "Well I've done that, and I want to move on." Compact disks have come out, and the industry is ignoring them. The Music Magazines, Hi-Fi Magazines won't have anything to do with them, they say, "Well, we're always going to have LP's, so we don't need a new medium", and I said, "Boloney." First, I sold all my computer magazines to computer world, and got 16 million dollars for that to work with.<br />
<br />
I then started a "CD" review magazine, which within the year, became the largest music magazine, and "CD's" were in. [laughs] I built a studio, I got interested in ragtime. I went to see the movie "The Sting," and they had...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Scott Joplin.<br />
<br />
Wayne: ...this Scott Joplin music there, and I said "Wow, where have I been? How did I miss this?" I'd always been a classical music fan since I was seven years old and was first exposed to it. It was an instant take on classical.<br />
<br />
I was down in New Orleans at a music conference and I was walking along the street with my wife and I heard Scott Joplin music coming out of this bar. I'd been very disappointed, I'd bought every LP I could find on Scott Joplin, and the performers were all mechanical. They didn't feel the music, and I felt it. This guy, Scott Kirby, felt it. I went in and we sat down and had a couple Cokes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: This Scott Kirby guy is playing live in the venue?<br />
<br />
Wayne: He was playing in this bar, and I brought him to New Hampshire and we made a CD of Scott Joplin music and the result was so spectacular that I built us a $100,000 studio, one of the real state-of-the-art. No two walls parallel anywhere, and one wall all mirrors on hinges, with sponge spikes behind. You could vary the liveliness of the room however you wanted it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Bought a huge grand piano and so forth, and like that, so anyway, we put out a whole bunch of CD's.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Hold on a second. [pause] Sorry.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well anyway, that's how computers got started. That was the start of the whole industry was because there was computer hobbyist groups. That's who I was catering to with "Byte" to start with.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I want to go back to a couple of things. First of all, you said you sold all your magazines to Computer World.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You just felt done?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They were humming along. They're probably doing pretty well.<br />
<br />
Wayne: They were doing very well, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You were just bored with it?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah, I had to move on. Yes. Just like with 73, when I ran out of new things, I closed it. With computers, I ran out of new things. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Going back even farther, when your ex-wife took the magazine from you, how did you feel? Did you feel betrayed, or was it just like an opportunity?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, sure. I sued her a little bit and settled for $100,000, which she never paid. That's when it cost me to start it. No big deal. I've never worried about money, never fussed about it. It's not important to me. Getting things done, sharing, is the big deal for me. When I find something fun, interesting, I have to share it. And that's what gets the magazines started and so forth.<br />
<br />
After CDs, I got that going. Then I sold that magazine. The next interest was Cold Fusion. I'd heard about it, and I heard more and more as I investigated. And I went out to a Cold Fusion conference out in...<br />
<br />
Kevin: What year are we talking here?<br />
<br />
Wayne: 1993. I went out to a cold fusion conference on Maui, in the Hawaiian Islands. I went there a little early so I could scuba dive all six islands. As a result of going to that, I decided to start "Cold Fusion" magazine. I hired on Gene Mallove as the editor. He had worked for MIT in their publications department. MIT was one of the early places where they tested cold fusion. They sent out a report saying it didn't work.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was this the nuclear reaction in a coffee cup thing that was...am I thinking of the right thing?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah. I can give you a simple explanation of it. But anyway, Mallove looked into it and he said, "Hey, you fudged these figures." They said, "Shut up. We're getting millions for hot fusion research. Shut the hell up," so he quit. I met him at the conference and hired him on to edit the magazine.<br />
<br />
The magazine took off. Of course, when we got ready to print the fourth issue, I came into the office one day and everything was gone. Everything was cleaned out. He moved up to Maine and put out his own magazine there using all my magazine articles that had been submitted and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: This had to seem familiar?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yes, right. I hired a guy from Vermont who was an expert, but he was in lunatic asylum. I got him out and hired him on. We put out the magazine in reduced form for 28 issues. We published all the scientific papers by the top physicists on exactly how and why this works. Jim Patterson, an inventor down in Sarasota, Florida, demonstrated a cold fusion cell at an energy conference.<br />
<br />
It was about the size of a coffee mug. He had one watt of electricity going in and 1,000 watts of heat coming out for the length of this show. What you do is you take powdered nickel and put it in water. Then you pass electric currents through the water which separates it into hydrogen and oxygen, OK, you with me?<br />
<br />
The hydrogen is absorbed by the nickel which is like a sponge. The Oxygen molecule is too big, and it passes off. Of course, you use the powder so you have the maximum surface area on the Carbon. Pardon me, on the Nickel.<br />
<br />
When it gets 82 percent full of Hydrogen, it begins to combine with the Nickel to make Copper which is the next one up on the Scale of Atomic Weight. There's 0.2 mass left over, that's gone. If you look at Albert Einstein's e=mc^2. Energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light. A tiny but of mass lost is equal to a huge amount of energy which comes off as heat.<br />
<br />
When you get it up to 82 percent it begins generating heat and will generate a lot of heat. What I look forward to is a unit in every building's basement that generates all the heat and the electricity that you can use for almost nothing, less than a thousandth the cost of oil. It uses very little Nickel to generate an awful lot of energy.<br />
<br />
The Department of Energy, no doubt urged by the Oil Industry, and at that time the Bush's were President. They were oil people from way back. The Department of Energy sent out a message to all the colleges and universities, "If you do any research on Cold Fusion on an undergraduate level you get no more money from the government for anything." Then they went to the Patent Office and said, "You're not to even look at patent applications for Cold Fusion."<br />
<br />
Then the head of the Department of Energy put out a book, Zenga, called "Cold Fusion, the Fiasco of the Century." They buried it. There's some science that it's being re-interred if you look at E-cat. Looks like Andrea Rossi may be getting going with it. It is the future, it is the way things are going to go. It has to.<br />
<br />
It's one of three technologies that are going to totally change the world, totally. Not one, the next one is the Takahashi capacitor. If you're into electronics think of a capacitor one inch square, about an eighth of an inch thick that has one farad of capacity.<br />
<br />
Now, we all deal with millions of farad in all of our electronics. I drove scooter all over outer London one day, all day... powered by one of these capacitors, call it a battery, if you will. It was half the size of a Coca-Cola can. We're talking about a battery for cars or any vehicle about the size of a shoebox that will power a car for 500 miles, recharge in a few seconds, and of course your cold fusion is nonpolluting in any way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What's the third item?<br />
<br />
Wayne: The third item, a book came out by Dr. Bruno Comby called Maximize Immunity. He said, "Look, in every research project with dogs, cats, rats, mice and so forth, those fed the standard American diet were getting cancer, heart disease, and other human ailments and those fed raw food weren't. The ones on the American diet were living only half as long."<br />
<br />
They tried some rats and they took three groups of them. One fed raw food. The second fed the American diet. When they got to the age of 60, human age of 60, they did an autopsy to find out how they were.<br />
<br />
The ones on raw food were in perfect shape in every way. Those that survived on the human diet were in terrible shape. Their teeth were bad. Their guts were bad and so forth.<br />
<br />
The third group they put on the American diet with cooked food and when they got to be 30 years old, in the human context, they took them off that diet and put them on raw food. Those that survived that long they autopsied when they got to be the equivalent of 60 and all back in perfect shape again.<br />
<br />
Dr. Bruno Comby, not being real stupid, his hospital in Paris, Institute Comby and you can go to comby.com, Institute Comby. Put his patients on raw food diets and he said he was unable to find any incurable [chime] illnesses, none. Then, a few weeks after reading this, I heard Dr. Lorrain Day on the Art Bell show and she is or was a trauma surgeon in San Francisco and taught in hospitals.<br />
<br />
She got a breast cancer and you go to drday.com and you'll see that breast cancer. She knew that chemotherapy made everybody terribly sick and didn't save any lives, about 97 percent deaths on it. She didn't go that route. It got down to where the cancer went all through her body, and they gave her days to live, gave her last rites, and then she changed to a raw food diet, and total cure.<br />
<br />
Since then, she says she has found no incurable illnesses when you do this. There's a DVD out now, "Rawfor30 Days.com," which shows a group of people with long-term diabetes going on a 30-day raw food regime. At the end of 30 days, they were all totally cured of diabetes...all of them, type two diabetes.<br />
<br />
I said, "OK," and I wrote a book for Americans, since Bruno Comby is French. He did get an American translation. A fellow up in Canada did that for him. But he only had a limited printing of it, so I wrote my book, which went into all that with a lot more details on fluoride and the dangers of that, and so forth.<br />
<br />
That is where we stand, and that's the third one. If the word gets around on that, it's going to put the pharmaceutical industry out of business. That is our most profitable industry in the country. The top 10 pharmaceutical companies make more profits than the other 390 companies on the Forbes 400 list combined. We're talking $3 trillion if you get sick, and nothing if you get healthy...so there's no money in health. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Why don't we get back to...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Best of three. Oh, get back to computers.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Computer magazines.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Serves you right.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sorry. [laughs] You're writing a book about health. I'm writing a book about computer magazines.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well, I knew all the beginners.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sorry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I knew everybody in the field at the beginning.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah? Tell me interesting people you met.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, I don't know. Let's see...well Bill Godbout. He put out Godbout computers for a while.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You went to a lot of conferences, early computer conferences, I assume?<br />
<br />
Wayne: How about Steve Jobs? Maybe you read my thing on that, where I heard about the Apple computer, so my wife and I stopped by to visit him. Took me out...well, first he called Steve Wozniak over, who designed and built the Apple I.<br />
<br />
They took me out to the garage and showed it to me and he said, "What do you think?" I said, "I think you've got a winner." I said, "Up 'til now, all of our computers had a motherboard. You plugged in the processor. You plugged in the memory. You plugged in the communication. You plugged in the keyboard." I said, "You've got it all on one board. That's the way to go."<br />
<br />
Jobs said, "Well, what'll we do?" I said, "Well, there's a first computer conference that's going to be in Atlantic City in two weeks. Be there." He said, "Oh, I can't afford to fly." I said, "Take a bus. Be there." I had my booth there for the magazine and right opposite of me was the Apple booth with Steve Jobs. At the end of show he came over he said, "Wayne! Wayne! I'm in business! I've got 12 orders!" [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent. What was the conference? What was it called?<br />
<br />
Wayne: It was a computer conference for microcomputers. Then a year later I stopped by to visit him and he had a laboratory at that time and I talked with him for a while. I said, "Well, you've got the Apple II here. How are you going to market that?"<br />
<br />
He said, "Well I'm going to sell it direct like we've been doing the Apple I." I said, "Well, we've got some computer stores now. Why don't you sell it through those?" "Oh, they'd take a discount. No, we're not going to do that."<br />
<br />
I said, "Alright, here's what you do first thing Steve, first thing. Hire a marketing manager." He hired a marketing manager, Mark Hula and learned it [laughs] and they sold through stores. The result was a very successful company.<br />
<br />
If I'd been able to get through the wall around Steve Jobs, he'd still be alive. I think he had pancreatic cancer. It's so easy to cure if you change to raw food. I'm 90 doing raw food.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I'm 90 years old and doing raw food. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Seems to be working for you. You had your editorial team, how does a typical issue go together?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, of which? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Let's go with Microcomputing.<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Assuming Kilobaud...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well, whatever. Anyway, the articles would come in and I had an editor for each and we invested in a computer system for setting type. At first you had to set type with linotype and all that stuff in the early days and then finally got computerized. I was right at the beginning of all of those, one of the first adopters.<br />
<br />
I had a whole team of them in my 40 room house there, what had been a bowling alley part of the house we did for production and so forth. We all produced there. Then I added the other buildings, the one next door for the color computer and so forth.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I kept adding more buildings. The books came out of north Peterborough and we put out quite of few books there of software and other things.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Type in software books?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there ever any other negative feedback from advertisers who didn't like how a review came out or wanted things to be written a certain way?<br />
<br />
Wayne: No. I don't recall ever having trouble with advertisers in any way, no. They loved the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Talk about the typical reader of Kilobaud. Was it more of a hobbyist market than some other magazines?<br />
<br />
Wayne: It was all hobby at that time because you had computer clubs around the country and that was what it was.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you read computer magazines today?<br />
<br />
Wayne: No, done that. That's a "Been there, done that," same thing with amateur radio. Without new technologies I lost interest in that. I got interested in that...Well it first started when I was 12 and I went to church one day, to Sunday school. A fellow came in with a box of radio parts and asked my friend Alfie if he was interested and Alfie said, "No." "What about you Wayne?" I said, "You bet!"<br />
<br />
I took them home and there was an article in Popular Mechanics on building a cigar box radio. I had the parts so I built it and I was trapped for life. [laughs] I went into business selling postage stamps to make money for radio parts, always the entrepreneur, I'd buy 50 pound sacks of stamps torn off envelopes and then sell them in five pound lots and did a brisk business with that with ads in the stamp magazines.<br />
<br />
Anyway, that bought me the radio parts. Then I went to high school and they had a radio club and I went there, that's where I learned about amateur radio. Then the next thing you know I got my HAM radio license.<br />
<br />
Again, the forefront in amateur radio at that time was the microwave stuff and VHF. What did I do? I built a little two and half meter walkie-talkie and that was the first rig that I went on the air with when I got my HAM license, walking around town talking to friends on two and a half meters.<br />
<br />
Then of course the war came along so they closed down the HAM bands. I was going to college. I was in my second year at college by that time. I joined the Navy one day before the draft board got me.<br />
<br />
They were yanking me right out of college, so I made a good deal with the Navy on that. The fellow who worked for my dad...My dad was in aviation. He started the first transatlantic airline, American Export Airlines.<br />
<br />
One of the fellows that worked for him was in the reserves and got called back in when the war started and he put me in touch with a fellow who was running the lab, the electronics lab over in Virginia across the river from Washington DC. I went down and visited him, Commander Bourne and he said, "Wow! I want you on my staff."<br />
<br />
I joined the Navy and he said, "Now first we're going to send you to radio school, or electronic school in the Navy here for nine months and then we'll get going here. Let me know when you're out so I can do the papers to get you back here." I went to the electronic school, Radio Material School, graduated on top, number one. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Well I had been a C student all my life. At any rate, when I graduated I had a choice of getting in touch with Commander Bourne and going back to the lab. I said, "No. I'm more dispensable. Let's leave that for somebody with a wife and kids or something."<br />
<br />
I volunteered for submarine duty which was the most dangerous of all, they had the highest loss of any branch of the service because everybody that was in the submarines was on a submarine. They didn't have a large land support. The next thing you know I'm on a submarine, USS Drum, spent five war patrols on that and I've written a book on my adventures there and we were one of the top scoring boats.<br />
<br />
The boat is on display down in Alabama. At Mobile Alabama it's on display there and you can see pictures that I took 70 years ago of the crew and me, [laughs] and so forth. We had some very, very close escapes. I saved the boat personally twice with my fast action.<br />
<br />
I was the radar operator and of course when we were submerged I was on the sonar. Anyway, there's a lot of interesting stories there. After the war I got back into college again and became president of the radio club and I said, "Well golly. We need a radio station here." I started a wire broadcasting station.<br />
<br />
I went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute up in Troy, New York. I started WRPI and we did all kinds of interesting news and shows, plays and so forth, and brought girls in from the local girls' college for the girls' parts. Today, that is the largest student activity, is that radio station which is now an FM station.<br />
<br />
After I got out of college I went to work first for a radio station down in North Carolina. I got fed up with that and had an opportunity. The fellow who introduced me to classical music when I was seven had done an article on my dad's airport. My dad was hired to design and build and operate an airport for Philadelphia.<br />
<br />
He had done a survey for the Department of Commerce on all the airports around the country. He built the first concrete paved runway central airport there. He managed that until he quit and went to work for one of the first airlines, Ludington Airlines, which is owned by Tommy Ludington and Amelia Earhart. Amelia Earhart kept her plane at my dad's airport, the Lockheed, and I used to play in that when I was a kid. He had her over to dinner a number of times. I got to know her.<br />
<br />
I'm one of the few people that knows exactly what happened to her. Her mechanic was a good friend of my dad's. As a matter of fact, you can find on the Web where my dad is in the plane with Don Whemple when he married Ms. Philadelphia. They did it all in the air [laughs] with my dad being there. That made the... I found that on the Web. At any rate... on and on. [laughs] I'll do a book someday...<br />
<br />
Kevin: You should.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Volume one of 10.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well, anyway, that's how computers got started. Before that I did cell phones the same way. I was publishing the HAM magazine and a few HAM clubs put automatic repeaters or relays on top of mountains and tall buildings to extend the range of handy-talkies and mobiles. I said, "Wow, this is fun." I put one up on the local mountain, and it made it so that any mobile HAM anywhere in New England could talk to any other.<br />
<br />
I had a lot of fun with that and I had my little handy-talkie, talking through it and so forth. I put a bridge to 10 meters so they could talk all around the world there, if they wanted. I published hundreds of articles on repeaters, and a group out in Chicago put their repeater up on the top of the tallest building there, the Sears Tower, and had little receivers all spread around the outskirts of Chicago to pick up the mobile units and the handy-talkies and relay it through the Tower.<br />
<br />
I kept writing in my editorial and said, "Look, I'm able to ski the mountains of New Hampshire, Vermont, and Colorado, and Utah, and make telephone calls anywhere in the world through the local HAM repeater." I said, "Everybody's going to want to do this." Well, Art Householder, K9TRG, out in Chicago, was working for Motorola, and he took my editorials to the top people at Motorola, and he said, "Here," and that's where cell phones started. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Awesome.<br />
<br />
Wayne: But when I started, there were about half-a-dozen clubs with repeaters. By the time I got through publishing articles and a handbook and a list and so forth, there were over 8,000 repeaters around the country in the HAM clubs. I was flying from Johannesburg, South Africa... I was publishing with some computer magazines there, they invited me down.<br />
<br />
I said, "Well, I'll come down if you also include a trip to Swaziland and Lesotho", and they said, "Done." I was flying in a plane they hired for me from South Africa up to Mbanane in Swaziland. I was talking to the HAMs all around South Africa from the plane by way of the repeaters, and all of a sudden the Swaziland repeater came on, and I said, "That's it - we're everywhere." [laughs] Anyway, that's how cell phones got started.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Then, of course, when computers came along, I said, "I think I can...again." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: When you were starting the computer magazines, there was clubs. Were there other computer magazines that you started basing Byte and Kilobaud on? I don't know exactly the timeline of them, what came when, so...but you feel like you were the first.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, I was the first at it. By the time Radio Shack was big, they were going in everywhere. It was getting very popular. They were selling well. [laughs] The programs were coming on, making it so that you could write letters and send email and stuff like that, and the web was developing.<br />
<br />
Bill Gates, I met him first at MITS, when they had the first anniversary of their putting out their Altair 8800. They had a party, and I attended that, and we got asked, "Well, now, what do we do with these things?" The best that anybody could come up with was, "Well, you can use it to program the lawn watering." [laughs] That's all they could think of to do with them at that time. [laughs]<br />
<br />
But anyway, right a few days after Bill Gates started working there, he came in. I think he went to school at Harvard. As a part of a computer class, he did a program in BASIC. When the 8800 came out, there was no software for it at all, nothing, just some little switches on the front. He went down there with his BASIC, and they hired him on.<br />
<br />
IBM was busy with a big lawsuit because they had so dominated the mainframe business. When they finally got through with that, they wanted to get into these microcomputers. By the way, we had...when the minicomputer came along at one-tenth the cost of the mainframe, it put all but IBM out of the mainframe business. They hung on. But the minicomputers...what was it? I'll think of the name anyway...What was the big one? Olsen, DEC, Digital Equipment, and so forth.<br />
<br />
I sat down and had lunch with Olsen. I said, "You've got to start adopting these microcomputers." He said, "Oh, they're just toys. We're not going to be bothered with that." I went over to Data General, which was another big one, and sat down with the president there. He said the same thing, "We're not going to be bothered with that," and on and on.<br />
<br />
I talked to all of the top people in the minicomputer business. Of course, about two or three years later they're all out of business. The microcomputers just dominated everything at one-tenth the cost of a minicomputer. Anytime technology comes along that is one-tenth the cost, it's going to dominate. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: At what point did you realize that computing was going to move from the realm of hobbyist to an actual thing that everyone...?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I don't think there was any time. It just happens. I didn't think about that. I was just busy keeping up, keeping ahead, actually. [laughs] Then Computerworld came along. I got to know Pat McGovern, the head at Computerworld, met him at a conference and so forth. They wanted to buy my magazines and I said, "Well, I've done that. I'll move on." They bought them.<br />
<br />
They didn't put anybody...I think his people got irritated at him making the decision on that. They put not very bright people at the head of each project and all the magazines died.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How many magazines did you sell at that point? Do you know?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I think about five. You have to have somebody who sees the future and gets there first, which I have always done. With compact discs, I noticed that there were six companies making almost 96 percent of all the compact discs, only one of them American the other five were European. I said this is crazy, we've got all these independents out here and they only have four percent of the market.<br />
<br />
We got a group of people to check each CD that an independent put out and tell me what the best cut was on that and I put out samples discs, CDs with 15 different independent samples on it and gave them away totally free except for shipping and handling which paid for everything [laughs] and sold millions of those and the result was that the independent sales went from four percent to 16 percent of the market, over a billion dollars more to them and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You had this advertisement for the indy CD in your magazine?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah. I put out a special journal for the independents of course [laughs] and a special catalog et cetera.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When did you get out of the CD magazine industry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: When it matured. I was never in it as a business, just wanted to make it work. I sold it to IDG where it died, that's the same people that bought my computer magazines. [laughs] But we've got a lot of things we need to change in this country and I've got some good proposals for it.<br />
<br />
The federal government is incredibly bloated, have some over two million people working for the federal government and hiring more all the time. I know how we can cut the government in half in three years, with everybody involved, enthusiastically cooperating. How's that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sounds good!<br />
<br />
Wayne: We've got these stupid wars. We haven't won a war since World War II. We keep getting into them for political reasons and not winning. Like, the Vietnam War, what did we lose, 55,000 Americans over there doing that? You've got nothing.<br />
<br />
We're not getting anything much out of Afghanistan or Iraq now. The only reason we went there was this 9/11 thing which turns out to have been totally fudged. I have a way we can get out of there successfully and win, easily and quickly at almost no expense.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I've looked at your blog and I've read many of your opinions. You seem like an opinionated person, you don't keep them to yourself.<br />
<br />
Wayne: I do my research and I pride myself of not having any beliefs, because a belief prevents you from re-thinking things, or accepting new data. I say "What is the data, what are the facts?" the best I can find them. I have 54 bookshelves full of books that I've read, doing the research, and very, very few novels. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think, for the moment, I'm going to say, I'm...<br />
<br />
Wayne: This is, this is...<br />
<br />
Kevin: I have... That's all the questions that I have for now. I need to assess what we've talked about and see where I have follow up.<br />
<br />
Wayne: This was a long 15 minutes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs] Sorry.<br />
<br />
Wayne: The beard is new, I just grew that just for the hell of it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Looks good. I have mine because my wife went out of town for like a week once, and I just stopped shaving because I'm lazy. She came back, and she said OK, that can stay.<br />
<br />
Wayne: [laughs] Well, I thought I'd see what it grew into.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
Wayne: I [indecipherable 57:21] so I can be Santa Claus.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Well thank you for your time.<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK. Well, as you can tell, I hate talking, and it has to be pried out of me. [laughs] Have fun with your book.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Thanks.<br />
<br />
Wayne: I get a free copy, don't I?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Absolutely, yeah.<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: All right, thanks Wayne.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right-O.</div>Mauryhttps://www.computingpioneers.com/index.php?title=Wayne_Green&diff=186Wayne Green2021-10-19T19:41:28Z<p>Maury: add a HR to separate header</p>
<hr />
<div>This is a transcript of an audio interview. This transcript may contain errors - if you're using this material for research, etc. please verify with the original recorded interview.<br />
<br />
Source: Floppy Days vintage computing podcast<br />
<br />
Source URL: http://floppydays.libsyn.com/floppy-days-48-kevin-savetz-interviews-wayne-green and https://archive.org/details/WayneGreenInterview<br />
<br />
Interviewer: Kevin Savetz<br />
<br />
Wayne Green was founder of 73 magazine; Byte magazine; Kilobyte, which became Kilobaud, then Kilobaud Microcomputing; 80 Micro magazine for the TRS-80; Hot Coco for the TRS-80 Color Computer; Run for the Commodore 64, inCider magazine for the Apple II; and several other computer magazines. <br />
<br />
This interview took place over Skype on January 29, 2013, when Kevin was doing research for a book about the very first personal computer magazines — Byte, Kilobyte, and Creative Computing. Although he decided not to write the book, he is publishing the interviews. Wayne Green died on September 13, 2013, eight months after this interview.<br />
<br />
----<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wikipedia, which is never wrong, [sarcastically] says you were born in 1922. Is that right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yep. Why sure!<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yep. Why sure! That's New Hampshire for yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was my next question. It says you live in Hancock, New Hampshire.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yep.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Mostly I want to start talking about "Kilobaud," but before we get there, the first magazine you published was "73", is that right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well the first magazine, yeah. I published an extended news journal before that that got to 64 pages and had 2000 subscribers, called "Amateur Radio Frontiers." Then in 1960 I started "73 Magazine" for amateur radio and published that for 43 years. It was always about new HAM technologies.<br />
<br />
This is fun, this is fun, let's do this, let's do this, and so forth and then I ran out of them and I said, "Well, it was never about making money," although it did make a good deal of money, but I've never done anything saying "Hey I can make money." It's always "Someone needs to do this." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent! 73...you stopped at what year?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Two double-O, three.<br />
<br />
Kevin: 2003, OK. You started with that, had you any magazine publishing experience before that?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well just that Amateur Radio Frontiers that's all, and oh, yes, when I did Amateur Radio Frontiers, it started out about radio teletype, M teletype, and that got me a column in "CQ Magazine" one of the 2 HAM magazines, and then I got the editor a better job, he wasn't a HAM, I got him a better job with a new magazine that was starting and they hired me on as editor for five years and I did very nicely, had a wonderful time there so I learned all about publishing.<br />
<br />
Then the publisher, who is not a HAM either, bought a yacht, got overextended and got a year behind on paying my salary, so he fired me. I said, "Well, this is so much fun." I had just enough money to publish the first issue of "73." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wow.<br />
<br />
Wayne: That's how I got into that, but yes, I had experience with publishing with CQ. I knew the advertisers, they knew me, the readers knew me, and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was "Byte" your idea, or how did you get moved from HAM radio into computing?<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK, well, I kept getting more and more articles for 73 on computers by computer hobbyists that were tied in with HAM radio. Then one of my advertisers, MITS, Micro Instrument Telemetry Service, had been advertising with me. They put out a $129 four-banger calculator, adding machine, a little adding pad and so forth.<br />
<br />
All of a sudden, one of the Japanese companies came out with one for about $20, [laughs] and put him out of business. He had been making computers as a hobby, so he put together the Altair 8800 using the 8080 chip from Intel, and put it on the market, and I read about that, and I said, "Ah-hah. I think this is going to be..."<br />
<br />
I thought up a short name for a magazine in the field, and I came up with "Byte," which I thought was right on mark. [laughs] I wrote to all of the companies that were making equipment that the hobbyists were using, and said, "Please send me your mailing lists, the people who have asked for information or that have bought from you." I kept getting shoeboxes full of these names and addresses, and I sent them out, and I was getting a 20 percent response. Now on direct mail, one percent is good. [laughs] I started publishing Byte Magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You wrote to these companies saying, please send me the list of people interested in your products...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right.<br />
<br />
Kevin: ...and then you mailed them about Byte Magazine?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is that right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Now, unfortunately, at that time, I had trouble with the IRS. One of my ad salesmen for 73 made a big mistake and offered a free ad to people who would start advertising with us. Well, immediately my competition told everybody about that and everybody that was advertising wanted a free ad. I had to fire the guy.<br />
<br />
Well he got even by telling the IRS that I was hiding money and the IRS came in and made life miserable. They came in and said, OK all this furniture in your office here that's a personal expense not a business expense, and you've had it for five or seven years so therefore you owe so much a year on that. Oh, this big camera that you're using for your photography, that's a two thousand dollar expense that was personal.<br />
<br />
They did one thing after another and built it up to where I owed about twenty thousand dollars and [laughs] took me to court. [laughs] At any rate, when I started the new magazine the lawyer said, well you better put it in somebody else's name for the time being. I had gotten back together with my first wife, who is now an ex-wife, and we had split up ten years before, and we got back together, and so I put it in her name, big mistake.<br />
<br />
After five issues, the magazine was going great guns and I came back from giving a talk one night and the magazine was gone, everything. All the files [laughs] , everything, was gone.<br />
<br />
Kevin: We're talking file cabinets, and pages laid out, and everything was just...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Everything got moved out, all the back issues and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you think you were robbed? What was your initial thought?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I knew right away what happened. I tried to get in touch with her. She said, "Oh, yes. We took the magazine."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Why do you think that happened? Why did she do that?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Because it was worth a lot of money. She published it for a few issues and then sold it to McGraw-Hill for $7 million dollars. Within a year or so it was billing over $1 million a month in ad sales and it got up to 800 pages a month, magazine. In the meantime I started to put out a magazine called "Kilobyte." [indecipherable 9:42] threatened to sue, so I made it "Kilobaud." Then I put out one called "Desktop Computing", which was in plain English, not computerese, for business men.<br />
<br />
When Apple came out with their...first I started with the Radio Shack computer, which was the biggest seller. They had 20 percent of the market with their TRS-80. I put out an "80 Micro" magazine. That got to be the third largest magazine in the country at 500 pages a month. [laughs] The reason Radio Shack got into this is because when I first got started with Byte I took the first issue with me down to MITS in Albuquerque.<br />
<br />
Then I stopped off in Fort Worth, Texas and visited an advertiser of mine in 73 who had a radio store there and showed him. I said this is going to be the big future. At any rate, then I went down to San Antonio where they were putting out a keyboard. I got an 8800 computer from MITS, the keyboard from the other place, and I made it work, and I said, "That's it, this is going to be great."<br />
<br />
I started "Byte Magazine," and at any rate the chap that I talked to in Fort Worth closed his store, went to work for Radio Shack, and the next thing I know they had a factory down there making TRS80's, and he was the head of it.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: That's a good gig.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right. But that got to be, as I said 20 percent of the market, and a couple of hundred small companies in there. I put out the magazine for that, and then I put out one for the color computer, called "Hot Cocoa." I put out another one called "Run."<br />
<br />
Kevin: For the Commodore, right?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I put out one for the Apple, and I put out one for dealers called Selling Micros, and so forth and I covered the field pretty well. There was a big need for software, so I started Instant Software Company, and I brought a local motel that had 12 offices for me instead of rooms. I took the center part where they had a big restaurant, and made that into a computer lab and got a bunch of computers, and hired on a lot of programmers.<br />
<br />
What I did was have the readers, send in any program that they made, and we would market it for them. Pretty soon, I had a couple of hundred programs on there. I had all kinds, business programs, educational programs, entertainment programs and so forth, and we were the largest software dealer there, in the industry for a while. Anyway, I kept going with that, and finally I said, "Well, done that, [chuckles] done that."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Seems like for a while, you must have had many employees, filling up your 12 offices. How big was your empire?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I had over 250. When I brought the building next door to mine...My building wasn't bad, 40 rooms. The one next door was a little smaller, and then bought the motel, and another building up in North Peter borough for the books that we were putting out, and we put out a lot of books. We had a shipping department out in West Peterborough. [laughs] I don't know I'm like that, we grew and grew.<br />
<br />
Finally, I said, "Well I've done that, and I want to move on." Compact disks have come out, and the industry is ignoring them. The Music Magazines, Hi-Fi Magazines won't have anything to do with them, they say, "Well, we're always going to have LP's, so we don't need a new medium", and I said, "Boloney." First, I sold all my computer magazines to computer world, and got 16 million dollars for that to work with.<br />
<br />
I then started a "CD" review magazine, which within the year, became the largest music magazine, and "CD's" were in. [laughs] I built a studio, I got interested in ragtime. I went to see the movie "The Sting," and they had...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Scott Joplin.<br />
<br />
Wayne: ...this Scott Joplin music there, and I said "Wow, where have I been? How did I miss this?" I'd always been a classical music fan since I was seven years old and was first exposed to it. It was an instant take on classical.<br />
<br />
I was down in New Orleans at a music conference and I was walking along the street with my wife and I heard Scott Joplin music coming out of this bar. I'd been very disappointed, I'd bought every LP I could find on Scott Joplin, and the performers were all mechanical. They didn't feel the music, and I felt it. This guy, Scott Kirby, felt it. I went in and we sat down and had a couple Cokes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: This Scott Kirby guy is playing live in the venue?<br />
<br />
Wayne: He was playing in this bar, and I brought him to New Hampshire and we made a CD of Scott Joplin music and the result was so spectacular that I built us a $100,000 studio, one of the real state-of-the-art. No two walls parallel anywhere, and one wall all mirrors on hinges, with sponge spikes behind. You could vary the liveliness of the room however you wanted it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Bought a huge grand piano and so forth, and like that, so anyway, we put out a whole bunch of CD's.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Hold on a second. [pause] Sorry.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well anyway, that's how computers got started. That was the start of the whole industry was because there was computer hobbyist groups. That's who I was catering to with "Byte" to start with.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I want to go back to a couple of things. First of all, you said you sold all your magazines to Computer World.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You just felt done?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They were humming along. They're probably doing pretty well.<br />
<br />
Wayne: They were doing very well, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You were just bored with it?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah, I had to move on. Yes. Just like with 73, when I ran out of new things, I closed it. With computers, I ran out of new things. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Going back even farther, when your ex-wife took the magazine from you, how did you feel? Did you feel betrayed, or was it just like an opportunity?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, sure. I sued her a little bit and settled for $100,000, which she never paid. That's when it crossed me to start it. No big deal. I've never worried about money, never fussed about it. It's not important to me. Getting things done, sharing, is the big deal for me. When I find something fun, interesting, I have to share it. [indecipherable 18:40] magazines started and so forth.<br />
<br />
After CDs, I got that going. Then I sold that magazine. The next interest was Cold Fusion. I'd heard about it, and I heard more and more as I investigated. Then I went out to a Cold Fusion conference out in...<br />
<br />
Kevin: What year are we talking here?<br />
<br />
Wayne: 1993. I went out to a cold fusion conference on Maui, in the Hawaiian Islands. I went there a little early so I could scuba dive all six islands. As a result of going to that, I decided to start "Cold Fusion" magazine. I hired on Gene Mallove as the editor. He had worked for MIT in their publications department. MIT was one of the early places where they tested cold fusion. They sent out a report saying it didn't work.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was this the nuclear reaction in a coffee cup thing that was...am I thinking of the right thing?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah. I can give you a simple explanation of it. But anyway, Mallove looked into it and he said, "Hey, you fudged these figures." They said, "Shut up. We're getting millions for hot fusion research. Shut the hell up," so he quit. I met him at the conference and hired him on to edit the magazine.<br />
<br />
The magazine took off. Of course, when we got ready to print the fourth issue, I came into the office one day and everything was gone. Everything was cleaned out. He moved up to Maine and put out his own magazine there using all my magazine articles that had been submitted and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: This had to seem familiar?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yes, right. I hired a guy from Vermont who was an expert, but he was in lunatic asylum. I got him out and hired him on. We put out the magazine in reduced form for 28 issues. We published all the scientific papers by the top physicists on exactly how and why this works. Jim Patterson, an inventor down in Sarasota, Florida, demonstrated a cold fusion cell at an energy conference.<br />
<br />
It was about the size of a coffee mug. He had one watt of electricity going in and 1,000 watts of heat coming out for the length of this show. What you do is you take powdered nickel and put it in water. Then you pass electric currents through the water which separates it into hydrogen and oxygen, OK, you with me?<br />
<br />
The hydrogen is absorbed by the nickel which is like a sponge. The Oxygen molecule is too big, and it passes off. Of course, you use the powder so you have the maximum surface area on the Carbon. Pardon me, on the Nickel.<br />
<br />
When it gets 82 percent full of Hydrogen, it begins to combine with the Nickel to make Copper which is the next one up on the Scale of Atomic Weight. There's 0.2 mass left over, that's gone. If you look at Albert Einstein's e=mc^2. Energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light. A tiny but of mass lost is equal to a huge amount of energy which comes off as heat.<br />
<br />
When you get it up to 82 percent it begins generating heat and will generate a lot of heat. What I look forward to is a unit in every building's basement that generates all the heat and the electricity that you can use for almost nothing, less than a thousandth the cost of oil. It uses very little Nickel to generate an awful lot of energy.<br />
<br />
The Department of Energy, no doubt urged by the Oil Industry, and at that time the Bush's were President. They were oil people from way back. The Department of Energy sent out a message to all the colleges and universities, "If you do any research on Cold Fusion on an undergraduate level you get no more money from the government for anything." Then they went to the Patent Office and said, "You're not to even look at patent applications for Cold Fusion."<br />
<br />
Then the head of the Department of Energy put out a book, Zenga, called "Cold Fusion, the Fiasco of the Century." They buried it. There's some science that it's being re-interred if you look at E-cat. Looks like Andrea Rossi may be getting going with it. It is the future, it is the way things are going to go. It has to.<br />
<br />
It's one of three technologies that are going to totally change the world, totally. Not one, the next one is the Takahashi capacitor. If you're into electronics think of a capacitor one inch square, about an eighth of an inch thick that has one farad of capacity.<br />
<br />
Now, we all deal with millions of farad in all of our electronics. I drove scooter all over outer London one day, all day... powered by one of these capacitors, call it a battery, if you will. It was half the size of a Coca-Cola can. We're talking about a battery for cars or any vehicle about the size of a shoebox that will power a car for 500 miles, recharge in a few seconds, and of course your cold fusion is nonpolluting in any way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What's the third item?<br />
<br />
Wayne: The third item, a book came out by Dr. Bruno Comby called Maximize Immunity. He said, "Look, in every research project with dogs, cats, rats, mice and so forth, those fed the standard American diet were getting cancer, heart disease, and other human ailments and those fed raw food weren't. The ones on the American diet were living only half as long."<br />
<br />
They tried some rats and they took three groups of them. One fed raw food. The second fed the American diet. When they got to the age of 60, human age of 60, they did an autopsy to find out how they were.<br />
<br />
The ones on raw food were in perfect shape in every way. Those that survived on the human diet were in terrible shape. Their teeth were bad. Their guts were bad and so forth.<br />
<br />
The third group they put on the American diet with cooked food and when they got to be 30 years old, in the human context, they took them off that diet and put them on raw food. Those that survived that long they autopsied when they got to be the equivalent of 60 and all back in perfect shape again.<br />
<br />
Dr. Bruno Comby, not being real stupid, his hospital in Paris, Institute Comby and you can go to comby.com, Institute Comby. Put his patients on raw food diets and he said he was unable to find any incurable [chime] illnesses, none. Then, a few weeks after reading this, I heard Dr. Lorrain Day on the Art Bell show and she is or was a trauma surgeon in San Francisco and taught in hospitals.<br />
<br />
She got a breast cancer and you go to drday.com and you'll see that breast cancer. She knew that chemotherapy made everybody terribly sick and didn't save any lives, about 97 percent deaths on it. She didn't go that route. It got down to where the cancer went all through her body, and they gave her days to live, gave her last rites, and then she changed to a raw food diet, and total cure.<br />
<br />
Since then, she says she has found no incurable illnesses when you do this. There's a DVD out now, "Rawfor30 Days.com," which shows a group of people with long-term diabetes going on a 30-day raw food regime. At the end of 30 days, they were all totally cured of diabetes...all of them, type two diabetes.<br />
<br />
I said, "OK," and I wrote a book for Americans, since Bruno Comby is French. He did get an American translation. A fellow up in Canada did that for him. But he only had a limited printing of it, so I wrote my book, which went into all that with a lot more details on fluoride and the dangers of that, and so forth.<br />
<br />
That is where we stand, and that's the third one. If the word gets around on that, it's going to put the pharmaceutical industry out of business. That is our most profitable industry in the country. The top 10 pharmaceutical companies make more profits than the other 390 companies on the Forbes 400 list combined. We're talking $3 trillion if you get sick, and nothing if you get healthy...so there's no money in health. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Why don't we get back to...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Best of three. Oh, get back to computers.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Computer magazines.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Serves you right.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sorry. [laughs] You're writing a book about health. I'm writing a book about computer magazines.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well, I knew all the beginners.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sorry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I knew everybody in the field at the beginning.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah? Tell me interesting people you met.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, I don't know. Let's see...well Bill Godbout. He put out Godbout computers for a while.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You went to a lot of conferences, early computer conferences, I assume?<br />
<br />
Wayne: How about Steve Jobs? Maybe you read my thing on that, where I heard about the Apple computer, so my wife and I stopped by to visit him. Took me out...well, first he called Steve Wozniak over, who designed and built the Apple I.<br />
<br />
They took me out to the garage and showed it to me and he said, "What do you think?" I said, "I think you've got a winner." I said, "Up 'til now, all of our computers had a motherboard. You plugged in the processor. You plugged in the memory. You plugged in the communication. You plugged in the keyboard." I said, "You've got it all on one board. That's the way to go."<br />
<br />
Jobs said, "Well, what'll we do?" I said, "Well, there's a first computer conference that's going to be in Atlantic City in two weeks. Be there." He said, "Oh, I can't afford to fly." I said, "Take a bus. Be there." I had my booth there for the magazine and right opposite of me was the Apple booth with Steve Jobs. At the end of show he came over he said, "Wayne! Wayne! I'm in business! I've got 12 orders!" [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent. What was the conference? What was it called?<br />
<br />
Wayne: It was a computer conference for microcomputers. Then a year later I stopped by to visit him and he had a laboratory at that time and I talked with him for a while. I said, "Well, you've got the Apple II here. How are you going to market that?"<br />
<br />
He said, "Well I'm going to sell it direct like we've been doing the Apple I." I said, "Well, we've got some computer stores now. Why don't you sell it through those?" "Oh, they'd take a discount. No, we're not going to do that."<br />
<br />
I said, "Alright, here's what you do first thing Steve, first thing. Hire a marketing manager." He hired a marketing manager, Mark Hula and learned it [laughs] and they sold through stores. The result was a very successful company.<br />
<br />
If I'd been able to get through the wall around Steve Jobs, he'd still be alive. I think he had pancreatic cancer. It's so easy to cure if you change to raw food. I'm 90 doing raw food.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I'm 90 years old and doing raw food. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Seems to be working for you. You had your editorial team, how does a typical issue go together?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, of which? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Let's go with Microcomputing.<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Assuming Kilobaud...<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well, whatever. Anyway, the articles would come in and I had an editor for each and we invested in a computer system for setting type. At first you had to set type with linotype and all that stuff in the early days and then finally got computerized. I was right at the beginning of all of those, one of the first adopters.<br />
<br />
I had a whole team of them in my 40 room house there, what had been a bowling alley part of the house we did for production and so forth. We all produced there. Then I added the other buildings, the one next door for the color computer and so forth.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I kept adding more buildings. The books came out of north Peterborough and we put out quite of few books there of software and other things.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Type in software books?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there ever any other negative feedback from advertisers who didn't like how a review came out or wanted things to be written a certain way?<br />
<br />
Wayne: No. I don't recall ever having trouble with advertisers in any way, no. They loved the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Talk about the typical reader of Kilobaud. Was it more of a hobbyist market than some other magazines?<br />
<br />
Wayne: It was all hobby at that time because you had computer clubs around the country and that was what it was.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you read computer magazines today?<br />
<br />
Wayne: No, done that. That's a "Been there, done that," same thing with amateur radio. Without new technologies I lost interest in that. I got interested in that...Well it first started when I was 12 and I went to church one day, to Sunday school. A fellow came in with a box of radio parts and asked my friend Alfie if he was interested and Alfie said, "No." "What about you Wayne?" I said, "You bet!"<br />
<br />
I took them home and there was an article in Popular Mechanics on building a cigar box radio. I had the parts so I built it and I was trapped for life. [laughs] I went into business selling postage stamps to make money for radio parts, always the entrepreneur, I'd buy 50 pound sacks of stamps torn off envelopes and then sell them in five pound lots and did a brisk business with that with ads in the stamp magazines.<br />
<br />
Anyway, that bought me the radio parts. Then I went to high school and they had a radio club and I went there, that's where I learned about amateur radio. Then the next thing you know I got my HAM radio license.<br />
<br />
Again, the forefront in amateur radio at that time was the microwave stuff and VHF. What did I do? I built a little two and half meter walkie-talkie and that was the first rig that I went on the air with when I got my HAM license, walking around town talking to friends on two and a half meters.<br />
<br />
Then of course the war came along so they closed down the HAM bands. I was going to college. I was in my second year at college by that time. I joined the Navy one day before the draft board got me.<br />
<br />
They were yanking me right out of college, so I made a good deal with the Navy on that. The fellow who worked for my dad...My dad was in aviation. He started the first transatlantic airline, American Export Airlines.<br />
<br />
One of the fellows that worked for him was in the reserves and got called back in when the war started and he put me in touch with a fellow who was running the lab, the electronics lab over in Virginia across the river from Washington DC. I went down and visited him, Commander Bourne and he said, "Wow! I want you on my staff."<br />
<br />
I joined the Navy and he said, "Now first we're going to send you to radio school, or electronic school in the Navy here for nine months and then we'll get going here. Let me know when you're out so I can do the papers to get you back here." I went to the electronic school, Radio Material School, graduated on top, number one. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Well I had been a C student all my life. At any rate, when I graduated I had a choice of getting in touch with Commander Bourne and going back to the lab. I said, "No. I'm more dispensable. Let's leave that for somebody with a wife and kids or something."<br />
<br />
I volunteered for submarine duty which was the most dangerous of all, they had the highest loss of any branch of the service because everybody that was in the submarines was on a submarine. They didn't have a large land support. The next thing you know I'm on a submarine, USS Drum, spent five war patrols on that and I've written a book on my adventures there and we were one of the top scoring boats.<br />
<br />
The boat is on display down in Alabama. At Mobile Alabama it's on display there and you can see pictures that I took 70 years ago of the crew and me, [laughs] and so forth. We had some very, very close escapes. I saved the boat personally twice with my fast action.<br />
<br />
I was the radar operator and of course when we were submerged I was on the sonar. Anyway, there's a lot of interesting stories there. After the war I got back into college again and became president of the radio club and I said, "Well golly. We need a radio station here." I started a wire broadcasting station.<br />
<br />
I went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute up in Troy, New York. I started WRPI and we did all kinds of interesting news and shows, plays and so forth, and brought girls in from the local girls' college for the girls' parts. Today, that is the largest student activity, is that radio station which is now an FM station.<br />
<br />
After I got out of college I went to work first for a radio station down in North Carolina. I got fed up with that and had an opportunity. The fellow who introduced me to classical music when I was seven had done an article on my dad's airport. My dad was hired to design and build and operate an airport for Philadelphia.<br />
<br />
He had done a survey for the Department of Commerce on all the airports around the country. He built the first concrete paved runway central airport there. He managed that until he quit and went to work for one of the first airlines, Ludington Airlines, which is owned by Tommy Ludington and Amelia Earhart. Amelia Earhart kept her plane at my dad's airport, the Lockheed, and I used to play in that when I was a kid. He had her over to dinner a number of times. I got to know her.<br />
<br />
I'm one of the few people that knows exactly what happened to her. Her mechanic was a good friend of my dad's. As a matter of fact, you can find on the Web where my dad is in the plane with Don Whemple when he married Ms. Philadelphia. They did it all in the air [laughs] with my dad being there. That made the...I found that on the Web. At any rate...on and on. [laughs] I'll do a book [indecipherable 44:04] .<br />
<br />
Kevin: You should.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Volume one of 10.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Wayne: Well, anyway, that's how computers got started. Before that I did cell phones the same way. I was publishing the HAM magazine and a few HAM clubs put automatic repeaters or relays on top of mountains and tall buildings to extend the range of handy-talkies and mobiles. I said, "Wow, this is fun." I put one up on the local mountain, and it made it so that any mobile HAM anywhere in New England could talk to any other.<br />
<br />
I had a lot of fun with that and I had my little handy-talkie, talking through it and so forth. I put a bridge to 10 meters so they could talk all around the world there, if they wanted. I published hundreds of articles on repeaters, and a group out in Chicago put their repeater up on the top of the tallest building there, the Sears Tower, and had little receivers all spread around the outskirts of Chicago to pick up the mobile units and the handy-talkies and relay it through the Tower.<br />
<br />
I kept writing in my editorial and said, "Look, I'm able to ski the mountains of New Hampshire, Vermont, and Colorado, and Utah, and make telephone calls anywhere in the world through the local HAM repeater." I said, "Everybody's going to want to do this." Well, Art Householder, K9TRG, out in Chicago, was working for Motorola, and he took my editorials to the top people at Motorola, and he said, "Here," and that's where cell phones started. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Awesome.<br />
<br />
Wayne: But when I started, there were about half-a-dozen clubs with repeaters. By the time I got through publishing articles and a handbook and a list and so forth, there were over 8,000 repeaters around the country in the HAM clubs. I was flying from Johannesburg, South Africa...I was publishing with some computer magazines there, they invited me down.<br />
<br />
I said, "Well, I'll come down if you also include a trip to Swaziland and Lesotho, and they said, "Done." I was flying in a plane they hired for me from South Africa up to [indecipherable 46:48] and Swaziland. I was talking to the HAMs all around South Africa from the plane by way of the repeaters, and all of a sudden the Swaziland repeater came on, and I said, "That's it - we're everywhere." [laughs] Anyway, that's how cell phones got started.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Then, of course, when computers came along, I said, "I think I can...again." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: When you were starting the computer magazines, there was clubs. Were there other computer magazines that you started basing Byte and Kilobaud on? I don't know exactly the timeline of them, what came when, so...but you feel like you were the first.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Oh, I was the first at it. By the time Radio Shack was big, they were going in everywhere. It was getting very popular. They were selling well. [laughs] The programs were coming on, making it so that you could write letters and send email and stuff like that, and the web was developing.<br />
<br />
Bill Gates, I met him first at MITS, when they had the first anniversary of their putting out their Altair 8800. They had a party, and I attended that, and we got asked, "Well, now, what do we do with these things?" The best that anybody could come up with was, "Well, you can use it to program the lawn watering." [laughs] That's all they could think of to do with them at that time. [laughs]<br />
<br />
But anyway, right a few days after Bill Gates started working there, he came in. I think he went to school at Harvard. As a part of a computer class, he did a program in BASIC. When the 8800 came out, there was no software for it at all, nothing, just some little switches on the front. He went down there with his BASIC, and they hired him on.<br />
<br />
IBM was busy with a big lawsuit because they had so dominated the mainframe business. When they finally got through with that, they wanted to get into these microcomputers. By the way, we had...when the minicomputer came along at one-tenth the cost of the mainframe, it put all but IBM out of the mainframe business. They hung on. But the minicomputers...what was it? I'll think of the name anyway...What was the big one? Olsen, DEC, Digital Equipment, and so forth.<br />
<br />
I sat down and had lunch with Olsen. I said, "You've got to start adopting these microcomputers." He said, "Oh, they're just toys. We're not going to be bothered with that." I went over to Data General, which was another big one, and sat down with the president there. He said the same thing, "We're not going to be bothered with that," and on and on.<br />
<br />
I talked to all of the top people in the minicomputer business. Of course, about two or three years later they're all out of business. The microcomputers just dominated everything at one-tenth the cost of a minicomputer. Anytime technology comes along that is one-tenth the cost, it's going to dominate. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: At what point did you realize that computing was going to move from the realm of hobbyist to an actual thing that everyone...?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I don't think there was any time. It just happens. I didn't think about that. I was just busy keeping up, keeping ahead, actually. [laughs] Then Computerworld came along. I got to know Pat McGovern, the head at Computerworld, met him at a conference and so forth. They wanted to buy my magazines and I said, "Well, I've done that. I'll move on." They bought them.<br />
<br />
They didn't put anybody...I think his people got irritated at him making the decision on that. They put not very bright people at the head of each project and all the magazines died.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How many magazines did you sell at that point? Do you know?<br />
<br />
Wayne: I think about five. You have to have somebody who sees the future and gets there first, which I have always done. With compact discs, I noticed that there were six companies making almost 96 percent of all the compact discs, only one of them American the other five were European. I said this is crazy, we've got all these independents out here and they only have four percent of the market.<br />
<br />
We got a group of people to check each CD that an independent put out and tell me what the best cut was on that and I put out samples discs, CDs with 15 different independent samples on it and gave them away totally free except for shipping and handling which paid for everything [laughs] and sold millions of those and the result was that the independent sales went from four percent to 16 percent of the market, over a billion dollars more to them and so forth.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You had this advertisement for the indy CD in your magazine?<br />
<br />
Wayne: Yeah. I put out a special journal for the independents of course [laughs] and a special catalog et cetera.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When did you get out of the CD magazine industry?<br />
<br />
Wayne: When it matured. I was never in it as a business, just wanted to make it work. I sold it to IDG where it died, that's the same people that bought my computer magazines. [laughs] But we've got a lot of things we need to change in this country and I've got some good proposals for it.<br />
<br />
The federal government is incredibly bloated, have some over two million people working for the federal government and hiring more all the time. I know how we can cut the government in half in three years, with everybody involved, enthusiastically cooperating. How's that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sounds good!<br />
<br />
Wayne: We've got these stupid wars. We haven't won a war since World War II. We keep getting into them for political reasons and not winning. Like, the Vietnam War, what did we lose, 55,000 Americans over there doing that? You've got nothing.<br />
<br />
We're not getting anything much out of Afghanistan or Iraq now. The only reason we went there was this 9/11 thing which turns out to have been totally fudged. I have a way we can get out of there successfully and win, easily and quickly at almost no expense.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I've looked at your blog and I've read many of your opinions. You seem like an opinionated person, you don't keep them to yourself.<br />
<br />
Wayne: I do my research and I pride myself of not having any beliefs, because a belief prevents you from re-thinking things, or accepting new data. I say "What is the data, what are the facts?" the best I can find them. I have 54 bookshelves full of books that I've read, doing the research, and very, very few novels. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think, for the moment, I'm going to say, I'm...<br />
<br />
Wayne: This is, this is...<br />
<br />
Kevin: I have...That's all the questions that I have for now. I need to assess what we've talked about and see where I have follow up.<br />
<br />
Wayne: This was a long 15 minutes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs] Sorry.<br />
<br />
Wayne: The beard is new, I just grew that just for the hell of it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Looks good. I have mine because my wife went out of town for like a week once, and I just stopped shaving because I'm lazy. She came back, and she said OK, that can stay.<br />
<br />
Wayne: [laughs] Well, I thought I'd see what it grew into.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
Wayne: I [indecipherable 57:21] so I can be Santa Clause.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Well thank you for your time.<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK. Well, as you can tell, I hate talking, and it has to be pried out of me. [laughs] Have fun with your book.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Thanks.<br />
<br />
Wayne: I get a free copy, don't I?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Absolutely, yeah.<br />
<br />
Wayne: OK. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: All right, thanks Wayne.<br />
<br />
Wayne: Right-O.</div>Mauryhttps://www.computingpioneers.com/index.php?title=Talk:Dave_Ahl_and_Betsy_Ahl&diff=185Talk:Dave Ahl and Betsy Ahl2021-08-19T22:41:26Z<p>Maury: </p>
<hr />
<div>I have tried my best to replace any [inaudible] sections with the correct text. Also a lot of names were wrong and these are mostly fixed. There's perhaps a dozen left that could use work, but some of these are ''really'' hard to hear. <br />
<br />
There are a number of lines in this transcript that do not appear in the original recordings. I am not sure, but I suspect the original transcription may have been on a slightly different version. I've tried to mark these.<br />
<br />
[[User:Maury|Maury]] ([[User talk:Maury|talk]]) 22:40, 19 August 2021 (UTC)</div>Mauryhttps://www.computingpioneers.com/index.php?title=Talk:Dave_Ahl_and_Betsy_Ahl&diff=184Talk:Dave Ahl and Betsy Ahl2021-08-19T22:40:14Z<p>Maury: Created page with "I have tried my best to replace any [inaudible] sections with the correct text. Also a lot of names were wrong and these are mostly fixed. There's perhaps a dozen left that co..."</p>
<hr />
<div>I have tried my best to replace any [inaudible] sections with the correct text. Also a lot of names were wrong and these are mostly fixed. There's perhaps a dozen left that could use work, but some of these are ''really'' hard to hear. [[User:Maury|Maury]] ([[User talk:Maury|talk]]) 22:40, 19 August 2021 (UTC)</div>Mauryhttps://www.computingpioneers.com/index.php?title=Dave_Ahl_and_Betsy_Ahl&diff=183Dave Ahl and Betsy Ahl2021-08-19T22:38:21Z<p>Maury: edits complete for now</p>
<hr />
<div>This is a transcript of an audio interview. This transcript may contain errors - if you're using this material for research, etc. please verify with the original recorded interview.<br />
<br />
Source: ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast<br />
<br />
Source URL: http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-280-david-and-betsy-ahl-creative-computing-magazine<br />
<br />
Interviewer: Kevin Savetz<br />
<br />
Date: 3/4 April 2013<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm interested in how you guys got together. Was it some sort of<br />
office romance? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It started before then. I was working at Drew University and I was<br />
dating the computer science professor. He invited Dave...he was a<br />
subscriber to Creative Computing. I can remember being at his house<br />
and picking up a copy of this magazine and thinking, "Creative<br />
Computing," and laughing. "What kind of a title is that?"<br />
He invited Dave to come speak to one of his classes. While he was<br />
there, he said, "I should stop by your placement office. We're<br />
starting to expand. I'm looking for some people." Right? Am I<br />
getting this right? I was looking for other opportunities, so I<br />
sent him my resume. Many months later, he hired me.<br />
<br />
David: She still smarts about that.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: I interviewed her in, I don't know, April or so.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You interviewed me on April 17th and you did not hire me until<br />
August 1st. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: A lot was going on that year. That was '78.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was a really long time after that that we got married. We didn't<br />
get married until 10 years later.<br />
<br />
David: Actually, I had hired Betsy as our business manager. That's what I<br />
really needed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Not a wife, then.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not wife then, either.<br />
<br />
David: Not at that point. We had 2 buildings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had one.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, well I was looking for...<br />
<br />
Betsy: My first job was to find another building.<br />
<br />
David: We were expanding like crazy. In fact, one of the reasons that I<br />
didn't hire her sooner, I had just left my day job at AT&T, and was<br />
facing up to, "Oh my gosh, can I afford to take a salary out of<br />
Creative Computing?" Yes, we had expanded a lot, but can I even pay<br />
myself, much less other senior people? I left AT&T in July, and<br />
finally by August it became clear I really have to get this<br />
administration end of things under control.<br />
The editorial was OK. I had enough outside contributors that were<br />
going along with what we were doing in-house that I could continue<br />
with that, but it was the other end of things where we really had<br />
some problems. So then we go to 2 separate facilities. One was a 2<br />
family house on the other side of Morristown, and the other was a<br />
converted greenhouse garage, which is where I started. So, Betsy<br />
was in the greenhouse garage where I had the administration side of<br />
things, and I was at the house and that was the editorial and art<br />
and...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Software.<br />
<br />
David: ...putting the magazine together. Software, right. So she would<br />
come over from her place to my office every day or two just to let<br />
me know what's going on, and we'd get together. But it wasn't until<br />
I don't' remember the date when Betsy was saying, "Well, I'd like<br />
to get into..."<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well I had spent all my summers in college and two thereafter<br />
working at our local newspaper, writing editing and putting the<br />
whole thing together, so I think I more or less just said, "We've<br />
got all these new product announcements that we don't have anybody<br />
to do, why don't I just do them?" So, I started out doing the press<br />
releases and things.<br />
<br />
David: Her newspaper experience was first in high school covering sports.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, I started out covering the unpopular sports as a senior in<br />
high school. Because they didn't want a girl to write about the<br />
important sports. So they let the girl write about the unimportant<br />
sports, which turned out to be the winning sports, at this small<br />
New Jersey high school. That's how I started.<br />
<br />
David: And then at the newspaper, you started by writing obituaries,<br />
right?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well, it's one of the things I did. I always wanted to be a Spanish<br />
teacher. I didn't know anything about this. So, I got this sports-<br />
writing job by way of a babysitting job, I babysat for the<br />
publisher's kids and on the way home one night he said to me, "We<br />
always have a boy from the school who writes about the sports for<br />
the paper, do you know anybody?" and I said, "Well, I know the guy<br />
who did it last year, and if he could do it, I could do it."<br />
So I did that and didn't' think much more of it. Went off to<br />
college, came back over spring break, and ran into the guy in the<br />
grocery store and he said, "Would you like a job working for the<br />
paper this summer?" And I said sure. I had no idea whether he<br />
wanted me to sweep the floors or what, but it was a job so I took<br />
it. It was in the editorial department.<br />
<br />
And I learned from some very serious journalists who had worked for<br />
a very good paper, the Newark Evening News, which was a very<br />
serious paper that probably was too serious and folded, probably in<br />
the mid '60s, but these people were really good journalists and<br />
they taught me a lot.<br />
<br />
I think it was that first year, about halfway through the summer<br />
the publisher was on vacation, the editor was going to go on<br />
vacation when the publisher came back and the publisher, the day he<br />
was supposed to come back had appendicitis, had to have an<br />
appendectomy which back in those days was a much bigger deal than<br />
it is now. The editor said, "Well, I'm leaving." [laughs] And there<br />
I was. I was running this little paper.<br />
<br />
David: So I figured if you can run a newspaper, even though it's just a<br />
summer job, she could do a lot for us. Well, Betsy continued to<br />
handle the administrative things for really quite awhile and, as<br />
she said, probably was initially doing new product releases. Cause<br />
you get just tons of it over the transom and from these smaller<br />
companies...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So you'd like get a press release and then you'd rewrite it, that<br />
sort of things?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well we had a new product section and it was a format, a style for<br />
them, for each one. If they sent a photo, do a photo, a cut line<br />
for it. Basically what I do is let them pile up and then sort<br />
through and figure out which ones were worthy of attention. And<br />
then it was kind of just filler. They ran in one column and when<br />
you came to the end of the magazine whatever you had leftover you<br />
would fill in with these.<br />
<br />
David: And the thing is that the companies that were putting out these<br />
press releases, this was back in the, what '76, '77 or so, tiny<br />
little companies. They had no marketing expertise so they were<br />
sending us, in some cases, not quite handwritten but pretty crude.<br />
So it took some editing and some real work to make them readable.<br />
And then, as Betsy said, you had to guess. OK, which one, this is a<br />
significant product but is this guy going to be able to make this<br />
company go or is it just going to flop? And we tried to be<br />
responsible to the readers. Reporting on things that weren't just a<br />
wonderful great new idea but something that they were going to have<br />
on the market that was going to get some support and everything<br />
else. So anyway. That was a long story of how we got together.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I still don't know how you got together.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We were working in an office about as large as this banquette here<br />
together. Because when we first started working together we didn't<br />
have this other house. So it was the two of us. You had an actual<br />
desk I believe. I had a table that he had made out of particle<br />
board. Yeah it was fancy and I had to put duct tape along it<br />
because the edge was making holes in my clothes.<br />
So we worked in this office back to back, sort of got to know each<br />
other, and became friends, little by little. He said to me, when<br />
you're looking for this building, it would be a good thing if there<br />
was a place for me to live because I'm in the process of getting<br />
separated from my wife. Which it turned out you didn't do right<br />
away but eventually you did. Right?<br />
<br />
David: Well, it was three months later. That was right away in a sense.<br />
What precipitated that was we had a woman that was working in the<br />
mailroom and she got in cahoots with somebody in the accounting<br />
department and they started working a little embezzlement.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was this at D.E.C. or at...<br />
<br />
David: Pardon?<br />
<br />
Kevin: at DEC or...<br />
<br />
Betsy: At Creative Computing.<br />
<br />
David: No, at Creative Computing. This was just after Betsy was hired. In<br />
fact, they had it going on before and I mean they were very good at<br />
it. What they did is they set up a bank account in the name of<br />
Creative Computing in the next county. And they would take very<br />
fourth or fifth check and it might be a subscription, it might be<br />
paying for an ad or something...<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was mostly the advertisers.<br />
<br />
David: Well it was both. And then they put that into their bank account.<br />
And then the one that was in the accounting department would mark<br />
the thing as paid.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, she didn't. That was her mistake.<br />
<br />
David: Well, she didn't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because that wasn't her job.<br />
<br />
David: Well she blew one. In any event it was my advertising manager that<br />
we had sent an overdue notice to one of the advertisers.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Apple.<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Apple. It was Regis McKenna, it was Apple's agency.<br />
<br />
David: And they said, we paid that. And a woman said, well send me proof.<br />
And they did. And we looked at the bank where it was deposited and<br />
then we called in local detective, police department. And they got<br />
the bank records and said, "How much do you think this was?" Well<br />
no they didn't say that, they said, this is probably a lot more<br />
than you thought.<br />
And it turned out to be well over $100,000. And our total annual,<br />
not even profit at that point...well, the gross was just about a<br />
million at that point, not quite, but close to it. So $100,000 was<br />
a big, big chunk 10 percent.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When was this?<br />
<br />
David: '78. And, so, obviously we fired these two. And then the court<br />
finally, well they determined that they had also, one of them had been<br />
involved in welfare fraud and other stuff and the court ordered<br />
them to pay it back at the rate of, I don't know...<br />
<br />
Betsy: 47 cents a week.<br />
<br />
David: It was some tiny amount.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Still paying you... [laughter and crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Course they'll never pay anything.<br />
<br />
David: And we got one payment you know, and that was it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And she was ordered to do public service. Like who wants someone<br />
doing public service for them who's done something like that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Magazines back then, probably any business but, they were a hotbed<br />
of intrigue. You had that happened and then the whole Bike Magazine<br />
getting stolen.<br />
<br />
David: So Betsy actually, in response to that brought, in response to the<br />
embezzlement brought in her Sister-in-Law Bobbi, and I think your<br />
mother too...<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Bobbi's mother.<br />
<br />
David: Bobbi's mother, OK. But one to...<br />
<br />
Betsy: My mother in law. I was a widow at the time.<br />
<br />
David: ...do some of the accounting because we didn't have an accountant<br />
and wanted just to help out and make some calls to advertisers and<br />
say can you speed up your payment a little bit and also calls to<br />
people that we owed money to, hey we're going to be maybe a little<br />
late. It really didn't look good. That was just a huge amount of<br />
money and so we had to stretch things out and hope that the growth<br />
continued so we could recover some of this.<br />
Betsy really rescued us there. It was amazing. We finally did<br />
stretch things out. What precipitated the separation with my wife<br />
at the time is I went home and told her this had happened and<br />
everything.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Thanksgiving weekend. Day before Thanksgiving.<br />
<br />
David: The day before Thanksgiving is when we got all the information from<br />
the police department and I went home to my wife and she said, "You<br />
dumb...," well I won't repeat the whole thing but, "You are so<br />
stupid. You trust people." "Yes, I trust people." "You shouldn't<br />
trust people like that. Get out of the house. I can't put up with<br />
this anymore." So it was a good thing we had a two family house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had this two family house.<br />
<br />
David: I moved into the bedroom on one side.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He had his office on one side of the top floor in the back bedroom<br />
and his bedroom in the back bedroom on the other side and his<br />
kitchen. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is this the place I was reading about where your bedroom was above<br />
the kitchen?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yes. The Ted Nelson.<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, a lot of things precipitated. Because of that, we had to<br />
make some other changes on personnel and move some people around. I<br />
think after that then Betsy took more of a role in the editorial<br />
end of things.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Stayed there until the bitter end.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The bitter end. Actually, I was there after he was gone.<br />
<br />
David: That's true.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ziff continued to pay me several months after they closed the<br />
magazine to stay behind and clean up because we have a 75,000<br />
square foot building. Make sure that we don't dispose of the<br />
hardware and just basically get it ready.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When you quit at the phone company to start a magazine, that must<br />
have been scary.<br />
<br />
David: I had left Digital Equipment in 1974, and I'm sure you read the<br />
whole rationale behind that, and joined AT&T in marketing,<br />
educational marketing. Same thing I was doing at DEC but obviously<br />
marketing different products to a different mix of customers. AT&T,<br />
back then and perhaps today, they had a real formula that you're in<br />
a job for two years and then they rotate you out or they put you in<br />
another job.<br />
The way AT&T works is they have certain steps. There's a manager<br />
and then a director level. There are levels, one, two, three, four,<br />
five. The operating companies, like Pacific Bell and so on, have<br />
similar steps that are considered a half step below AT&T. What they<br />
do is they rotate you out to an operating company, a half step<br />
promotion, they rotate you back into AT&T, now you're a full step.<br />
You never get a full step in one company.<br />
<br />
They had offered me a rotation to Southern Bell. Birmingham,<br />
Alabama. "No. No." Then probably two or three months later said<br />
we've got an opening in Wisconsin Tel. "Oh my gosh. Come on,<br />
something sensible." I turned them down, which was bad. You can't<br />
turn down. If you turn down three you might as well retire.<br />
<br />
The third one was, in a sense, it wasn't a promotion but it was a<br />
sideways job jump within AT&T itself. I went from having the<br />
education group, which was about eight people, to corporate<br />
communications, which is about 100 people and a huge budget. I was<br />
responsible for all of the marketing communications for the whole<br />
Bell system. Not advertising.<br />
<br />
We had seminar centers, put out all kinds of educational pamphlets,<br />
even a magazine for our customers on how to use the equipment. I<br />
was doing that. It's a big job. It's a 50 hour a week job. Creative<br />
Computing was halfway down the block. I'd go there at lunch time,<br />
see how things were doing.<br />
<br />
As I said a little bit ago, when it looked like we were going to<br />
hit a million dollars I said I've got to get serious about this.<br />
That's when I resigned from AT&T. That was probably the first, I<br />
shouldn't say the first, but that was a major problem with my wife<br />
at that time. You're leaving AT&T? You're leaving all those<br />
benefits? What are you doing, you idiot? We were on the downward<br />
spiral at that point and then the embezzlement just sealed the<br />
whole thing.<br />
<br />
Leaving any job for an unknown thing like you started a little<br />
company and you leave your day job. You're making a real<br />
commitment.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Even once you were at Creative full time, it looks like you did a<br />
lot of everything. You were writing, you were doing programming,<br />
you were being the editor, the publisher and the editor which is<br />
not done anymore.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. I don't know. You can correct me. I don't think I was a<br />
control freak.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. You had Phil Ellenberg. You had just hired Phil Ellenberg as<br />
the advertising manager. Richie was doing it. Where did he come<br />
from? He came from some respectable place. He came from some<br />
respectable place, Phil Ellenberg.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, he did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was like a real person who had a real job, not like the rest of<br />
us. He was the ad manager. I think once you made the step to leave<br />
AT&T then you mostly concentrated on the editorial. You weren't<br />
selling ads and writing and you had Steve North who was doing a lot<br />
of the editorial.<br />
<br />
David: At the beginning, yeah. The thing is I'd be lying if I said I knew<br />
how things were going to go, I knew this was going to be a huge<br />
magazine some day. I had no clue. When I started Creative Computing<br />
there weren't even personal computers at that point. I was<br />
convinced, I guess, that they would come about. I had no idea that<br />
it would be three months later that the Altair came about. It was<br />
more that I thought that an educational magazine like we had been<br />
publishing at DEC should continue.<br />
DEC had dropped off. They stopped publishing Edu when I left the<br />
education group. Well, they published an issue or two but they<br />
really weren't serious about continuing it. Then you had all of<br />
these people out here in the west coast, the Hewlett Packard<br />
computers. They were publishing some good software, they had some<br />
good arrangements with Minnesota Educational Computers Consortium<br />
and some others to distribute stuff that they developed, but there<br />
was no information source for schools and teachers and kids that<br />
were using computers.<br />
<br />
That's what I envisioned initially, but then once the Altair and<br />
the others came out people buy this kit computer and say what can I<br />
do with it? We've got these programs that will run.<br />
<br />
Betsy: First you have to steal Basic.<br />
<br />
David: What?<br />
<br />
Betsy: First you have to steal Basic.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I noticed that, I don't know what it's called, the public opinion<br />
or I don't know the word, this part here. The number one magazine<br />
of computer applications.<br />
<br />
David: That was a Davis thing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It started off first issue a non-profit magazine of educational and<br />
recreational. That was November 1970. May/June 1975 the words non-<br />
profit disappeared.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He never set it up as a non-profit.<br />
<br />
David: I did not.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You started making a profit.<br />
<br />
David: That's right. [laughs]<br />
Betsy; It was the unintentionally non-profit.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Three years later it quietly changed into the number one magazine<br />
of computer applications and software.<br />
<br />
David: That was when Ziff Davis took over.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Really? No, that was '78.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, that was '78.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, '78.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He stayed until the end.<br />
<br />
David: Right. OK. You're right. Who knows. We changed it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It seemed like a good idea at the time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's clearly a shift from education to education plus other things.<br />
<br />
David: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think it was when he realized that if you really wanted to make a<br />
profit you had to leave education behind because teachers want<br />
everything for free, or they certainly did then.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They have some websites for teachers. They still do. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Schools, teachers, yeah, they want everything for free and they get<br />
a lot for free. Places like Huntington Computer Project. There was<br />
one out here, Oregon. Yes, there was. I think it was based right<br />
here in Portland. It would have been, right, if it was in Oregon?<br />
Yes, there was a computing consortium at that time, Hewlett Packard<br />
oriented.<br />
Then you had People's Computer Company down in California that was<br />
sort of providing stuff to schools. They were mostly into<br />
alternative schools and there were a lot of them in the Bay area at<br />
that time. In fact, there was a magazine or a newspaper, big thing,<br />
I don't know how often it came out, called the "De-school Primer".<br />
<br />
It was for people that...I won't say they were hippies but<br />
basically homeschoolers but they got together and said, "We're<br />
going to educate our kids outside of the public education system<br />
but we don't want to do it individually. We'll get together." There<br />
was a big movement there and they were into computers, unlike the<br />
public schools back in '75, '76.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Homeschooling back then was very avant-garde. It was not approved.<br />
<br />
David: Not like today. The shift away from education. That, of course, was<br />
partially driven by the hardware that was then available to people<br />
at home.<br />
When I first started the magazine, I had four editors over the<br />
years, five I guess, but Steve Gray had been publishing a<br />
newsletter, what he called the "Amateur Computer Group Newsletter".<br />
It was for engineers who were scavenging up old parts from<br />
Honeywell and IBM and GE and DEC and trying to put together a<br />
computer. You've got success stories and here's how you can make<br />
this worth together.<br />
<br />
That was a long way away from an Altair, but that's what I was<br />
focusing on, people that were doing that and education. Changed our<br />
focus. You're right. Good observation.<br />
<br />
Kevin: After that, do you feel the focus changed in the next 10 years?<br />
<br />
David: The focus changed largely due to selling the magazine to Ziff<br />
Davis.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When's that?<br />
<br />
David: We were negotiating for a while and I think the sale finally went<br />
through in '83. Yeah, '83. Maybe late '82 but roughly then. They<br />
felt that you need more of a business focus, small business and<br />
people running businesses out of their home. That's where it<br />
started but then we got into real small businesses. I shouldn't say<br />
real but a store front or a small manufacturer, something like<br />
that. That's probably a direction we would not have gone. I<br />
wouldn't have gone on my own.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had a magazine called "Small Business Computing." Remember?<br />
<br />
David: That's right, we did. I would have kept Creative more targeted on<br />
the home market and still education, to some extent, but more on<br />
the home and people that were running a business, a single<br />
entrepreneur. You could review a spreadsheet or a small business<br />
computer or higher end printer or something but not lift it up to<br />
that next level up.<br />
When you're owned by somebody else and they say this is what we<br />
want to do you've got to be responsive to it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Why did you sell? Was it something that had to be done? I've read<br />
the official line.<br />
<br />
David: I think the official line is pretty close to the real line. What<br />
happened is the first magazine, maybe not the very first but the<br />
first sizable magazine, to sell was the Byte and they sold to<br />
McGraw Hill. Then there were three or four other sales. At the time<br />
there were maybe eight special interest publishers in the country.<br />
You had Hurst and CBS magazine and Ziff Davis. Maybe eight serious<br />
ones. There were some others that were, "Oh, it'd be nice if we<br />
could get into it."<br />
What happened is all of us at that point were spending maybe<br />
$100,000, $150,000 on circulation promotion. McGraw Hill says we<br />
want to get out there, we're going to spend a million dollars.<br />
They're mailing 10 times as much as we are. They're going to trade<br />
shows with big, elaborate booths and handing out all kinds of...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Free magazines.<br />
<br />
David: Not only free magazines but other stuff. That was half of it. The<br />
other half, which was probably more than half, was the advertising<br />
sales. We were using reps. We had different reps in different parts<br />
of the country, paying the rep commission on the advertising. When<br />
you are a McGraw Hill or a Hurst or a Ziff Davis you've got an in-<br />
house staff. They would have a reception at one of the computer<br />
conferences, a big deal.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We used to have a hospitality suite at the hotels in some of these<br />
conferences and then we would bring little hunks of cheese that we<br />
cut up from home and sneak the bottles of wine up the back stairway<br />
and they were having these big things with the giant balls of<br />
shrimp.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. It was just an order of magnitude different than what we<br />
could do. What happened, really, was that it got to the point where<br />
there were only three, really two, serious bidders that were still<br />
looking for a magazine and there are still about four magazines,<br />
four decent quality magazines, on the market and one was Compute,<br />
one was Interface Age. Personal Computing had just sold, there was<br />
us, and I forget who the fourth one was. There was four.<br />
<br />
Kevin: There were more magazines than buyers at this point.<br />
<br />
David: That's right. There were a lot more magazines, too, but there were<br />
four major players. One of the buyers, I didn't really regard them<br />
as serious, and that was Atari. I think they wanted to back into<br />
the thing. The two buyers left were CBS, and they had a magazine<br />
division at that time, and Ziff Davis and that was it. I said,<br />
"Man, I've got to make a deal here." That's what happened.<br />
I look back with hindsight. I said the guy, Robert I forget his<br />
last name, that owned Compute magazine, he held out. He held out<br />
until the end and he said, "I'm better than Interface Age," and he<br />
was and whatever the other one was, Family Computing, "I'm better<br />
than them." He got a really nice payoff from CBS because it was the<br />
last one and they wanted him. I don't know. If I had held off a<br />
little more would I have gotten more? Probably.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How much did you get?<br />
<br />
David: Can we publish this figure?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't know. I don't think we ever have.<br />
<br />
David: No, we never have.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's my chance for a scoop.<br />
<br />
David: Pardon?<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's my chance for a scoop.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] I'd rather not say. I can tell you Compute, if you ever<br />
read that number, which you will, it was seven times that much. It<br />
was huge. Huge. At that point, I think CBS just said we've got to<br />
get into this. We've really got to do something. The big loser was<br />
Bob Jones at Interface Age. He had a good magazine. That was a<br />
good, solid magazine. Bob Jones, he went to shows, he was always in<br />
a suit and tie. He would have fit into the corporate environment<br />
very well but he held out too long. I think he was holding out for<br />
even more.<br />
That's what I was afraid of. Less than a year later he was out of<br />
business. There was no way you could compete with these big guys.<br />
I mean Ziff instantly started having these receptions at PC expo...<br />
<br />
Betsy: They had ad reps all over the country.<br />
<br />
David: Ad reps, yeah. Oh my gosh. So we would not have survived.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So again, you timed it right.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Not exactly right but yes. Wasn't bad. Wasn't bad.<br />
<br />
Kevin: But Ziff didn't have it for very long before they let it go. It was<br />
only a couple of years.<br />
<br />
David: It was almost four years. Three and a half years. They did a study,<br />
and this is one of the classics. I've been making a presentation at<br />
Leslie Park last year on the 10 biggest blunders in personal<br />
computing, and actually it's up to 12 now. One was, and I still<br />
feel that it was huge, is that Ziff Davis analyzed that market in<br />
'85 and determined that the home market, the market for home<br />
computers, had reached saturation. Five percent of the homes have a<br />
computer. That's it.<br />
There were three things, three major conclusions from their survey.<br />
I think probably one and a half of them were pretty good and one<br />
and a half were just absolutely wrong. The home market reaching<br />
saturation, wrong. The second one was that they said that the<br />
magazines that would be successful would be those that were focused<br />
on specific brands of computers. Are you getting all that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: With the IBM PC it really brought standardization to the industry.<br />
Their analysis was that Apple and PC were going to be the dominant<br />
players in the future and in that they were right. They said we've<br />
got to have a magazine that's just focused on those two and they<br />
did. What was their Apple magazine? They had two Apple magazines.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A+.<br />
<br />
David: But they also had the one for the Mac.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mac User.<br />
<br />
David: They had two Apple magazines and then PC. PC they spun off a whole<br />
bunch. PC Week.<br />
<br />
Betsy: PC Junior.<br />
<br />
David: A bunch of them. In any event, they were right in that. The other<br />
one that they were semi-right, in the long term future they were<br />
totally wrong but in the short term future they were probably<br />
right, and that they looked at...We had been covering bulletin<br />
board systems. CompuServe, whatever its predecessor was, basically<br />
online type of stuff.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Genie.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. They said that's just a flash in a pan, online stuff. Well, in<br />
'85 it was. It took a while. It took another 8 to 10 years for that<br />
but then oh my God. You know what's happened today. If they had<br />
stuck with Creative Computing and rather than trying to make it a<br />
small business focused magazine but kept the home and the online<br />
focus we would have owned the Internet market today, absolutely<br />
owned it. It would have been a bigger magazine than all the others<br />
put together. Hindsight is 20/20.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I know it wasn't your choice but do you have regret about that?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: At the time it was devastating.<br />
<br />
David: Absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was like someone killing your child.<br />
<br />
David: At the time, we sat in these meetings up in Stanford, Connecticut,<br />
of all places. The reason for that is Bill Ziff. What happened in<br />
the interim a year or two after they purchased Creative Computing<br />
and PC, Bill Ziff came down with cancer really big time and was<br />
afraid of dying next year. So he was moving all of his resources<br />
and the holdings outside of New York to avoid really major<br />
taxation. I'm not sure that Connecticut was much better but he was<br />
splitting them between Connecticut and Florida. Anyway, we wound up<br />
having a bunch of meetings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was trying to maintain residence in Connecticut.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I guess that was it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was living in the Crown Plaza.<br />
<br />
David: I remember the last one. We were up at the hotel.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Crown Plaza. It was Stanford, it wasn't Harvard.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, Stanford.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I said Harvard.<br />
<br />
David: When they finally came and said we're going to shut this down. That<br />
was a devastating time. We probably could have continued to work<br />
for Ziff if we had been willing to go into New York but when you<br />
get used to working a mile or two from where you live the idea of<br />
commuting into New York, who knows what the job would have been.<br />
Bye. That was it. That was, in retrospect, a mistake.<br />
The other thing that happened as a result of Bill Ziff having this<br />
bout with cancer is that Ziff Davis sold off all of their other<br />
special interest magazines. Popular Boating, Popular Photography.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yachting, Modern Bride.<br />
<br />
David: They had a big group of travel magazines. Actually, one of the<br />
things they did after Creative Computing was to shut down...we got<br />
friendly with the publisher and some of the people in the traveling<br />
division and we started doing some freelance travel writing.<br />
I was writing a monthly column for one of the travel magazines that<br />
went to travel agents on automating your travel office and so on,<br />
which was an interesting thing because there's a small business<br />
that really depended upon computers with the reservation systems<br />
and all the airlines had a different reservation system. You had to<br />
have Saber.<br />
<br />
A lot of them would go with one and make an agreement with somebody<br />
else to make their other reservations. In any event, it was a bad<br />
system and I was writing a column on how to make this work for you.<br />
As you know, I don't know how many months later we got into the<br />
Atari camp.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was your next gig?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. It was Joe Sugarman, remember, that hooked us up with Atari.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I thought it was Neil Harris.<br />
<br />
David: He was the one we worked with but it was Sugarman.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because he came from Commodore. I didn't know it was Joe Sugarman.<br />
<br />
David: He ran a company called JS&A for Joe Sugarman and Associates. They<br />
were the first one that took these full page ads in lots of<br />
different magazines and the quarter page...<br />
<br />
Betsy: The first advertorials.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, advertorial. The first print advertorials. Really serious<br />
stuff. Out of that, he spawned at least a dozen other companies.<br />
Sharper Image is a Sugarman and it's a spinoff. They've got a whole<br />
page just focused on this air ionizer or some crazy product, but he<br />
sold tons of that stuff. Then he started offering courses. He was<br />
on the verge of doing some big deal with Atari and so he knew all<br />
the people out there.<br />
I had taken his course and started running the ad. In fact, there's<br />
probably one in one of those issues that is basically a Sugarman<br />
ad. And so anyway, you took the course, too. So we got to know him.<br />
He got to know us, and we kept up. And, oh, OK. Creative Computing<br />
has folded, and I'm trying to get something going with Atari and<br />
getting their magazine really serious. And so he was the one that<br />
hooked us up with them. By the way, I'm surprised that you don't<br />
have Atari Explorer on your website<br />
<br />
Kevin: On the website? Well, the deal with my Atari magazines website is<br />
I've always strove to get permission. Atari can't be owned by the<br />
same company for more than three months at time.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's hard to get permission that way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You can't get permission. But it's out there, elsewhere. There are<br />
other archivists who don't bother to get permission. That's another<br />
good way to do things. Yeah, it's out there. I think Archive.org<br />
has it.<br />
<br />
David: Really? Yeah, because I hadn't seen it. I was looking for<br />
something...I still get inquires every once in a while from<br />
somebody that wants something in one of the previous magazines that<br />
we've published.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That's why I don't' risk it. There's a few magazine that I just<br />
absolutely would not, because it's owned by some giant monolith<br />
corporation now, and they need to hold on everything even if it's<br />
30 years old.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because someday they might be able to make money from it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right. That's why that's not there.<br />
Talk to me about...You did some weird stuff. The weird stuff I'm<br />
thinking of is the board game.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: "Computer Rage."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We just saw that. We might not have even remembered what it was it,<br />
but we saw it last night at the museum.<br />
<br />
David: They have one in the Collection's area of the Computer Museum. They<br />
didn't even know that we published it. I thought, "Look at this."<br />
<br />
Kevin: You did Computer Rage, which was weird; I want to ask you about<br />
that. You did the record album.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The record album made way more sense than the game.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, well it was a guy named Allan. He was a colonel at that time<br />
and he came to see me with the idea for the computer game.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I forgot about that.<br />
<br />
David: He was a colonel in the Army and had something to do with<br />
educational programs. The Army said people should know more about<br />
how computers work and everything else. He said, "The games that<br />
are on the market are pretty tacky and not fun. I've devised<br />
something." We worked together with him. We finally decided, "All<br />
right. We'll publish this game." By the way, he's a general and<br />
finally retired.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But he's not financing his retirement with the royalties of the game.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: No, not at all.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Will anyone buy this?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We did overprint.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't a big seller or big success, but we sold enough of them.<br />
Now the record was a little different. There was a guy named Dick<br />
Moberg who, at the time, was the president of the Philadelphia Area<br />
Computer Society. The first two personal computer festivals were<br />
actually in New Jersey, not the west coast. The West Coast Computer<br />
Faire came later with Jim Warren and that group. John Dilks started<br />
this computer festival in Atlantic City. This was before Atlantic<br />
City was a big casino place, but...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well, it was a casino place, but...<br />
<br />
David: ...but it was pretty tacky.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It still is.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Not like now.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not like now where it's so classy.<br />
<br />
David: In any event, they were having some issues with the hotel and the<br />
convention center in Atlantic City. Dick Moberg said, "We people in<br />
Philadelphia can do a better job than you guys in New Jersey." And<br />
he got together with what was his name? Lenny? And<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh! Saul Levis.<br />
<br />
David: Saul Levis, who was the president of the New Jersey amateur<br />
computer group. The two of them got together and said yeah, it'll<br />
be more convenient if we do a thing in Philadelphia. And Saul<br />
Levis, he had put together the first Trenton computer festival. It<br />
wasn't a big huge thing; it's gotten to be gigantic. In any event<br />
they said OK, we'll do this. At that point, this was '78; the Apple<br />
had just come out and people were making little plug-in<br />
peripherals.<br />
There was a company that...I'm not going to be able to remember who<br />
it was. They made a nice little plug-in board for the Apple. What<br />
they had was a very nice thing on the screen where you could<br />
position notes and then have them played back. So it was a visual<br />
programming of music.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Music Construction Center?<br />
<br />
Betsy: There were ads for it in magazines.<br />
<br />
David: No, it was a guy out of Denver. I don't remember. Anyway, before<br />
that everything had appeared line by line. But there were some<br />
reasonable playback systems that were starting to come on the<br />
market for the S-100 bus. There were about four of them. The<br />
programming was a little bit harrier, but nonetheless they sounded<br />
OK. And then there was still the leftovers in a sense that people<br />
that were doing work on mainframes to process music.<br />
So Dick Moberg said, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could get a number<br />
of these together?" And of course there's the Philadelphia<br />
Orchestra, we'll make it a Philadelphia Computer Music Festival! So<br />
it was largely his idea, but then, how do you publicize it? Well,<br />
you've got this magazine that's in your backyard, that was willing<br />
to recruit some people and publicize it. So we got about...I don't<br />
know at the festival there were probably 25 or 30 people that had<br />
stuff.<br />
<br />
They recorded it all, which in retrospect was a bit of a mistake<br />
because they had problems with one of the two channels in the<br />
stereo. They had the big reel-to-reel tape recorder, one of the<br />
channels was seriously too low. And then they said, "Well, we've<br />
got this wonderful tape; what are we going to do with it?" And I<br />
said, "Well, I'll do something with it."<br />
<br />
I hooked up with a studio in the city that made records, and we<br />
went in there and corrected the low channel a little bit, not<br />
totally, but enough that it sounded like stereo. And put together a<br />
vinyl record!<br />
<br />
I edited out a lot of the poor quality performances, made the<br />
record, and that sold! It sold pretty well. Our biggest problem was<br />
shipping. How do you ship a 12-inch vinyl record without it<br />
breaking? But that sold pretty well. That, of course, died off<br />
along with everything else when Creative Computing got killed by<br />
Ziff. But, I still had the original test pressing of that, the<br />
original, original.<br />
<br />
I played it back, and it sounded very good. Put it into, I forget<br />
what the software was, but, it was one, the digital routine. It<br />
would have been nice if I still had the original tape, but, I<br />
didn't. But, OK, it's got a little bit of deterioration, going to a<br />
record.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, we're not talking about losing overtones of a<br />
violin up at 15,000 hertz. It was within a narrow band, to begin<br />
with, in any event. But that did let me totally correct the left<br />
channel and bring it up to what it should be. I put that out. I'm<br />
selling CDs now, of that.<br />
<br />
In fact, a guy from Australia ordered one, and obviously, the<br />
postage to send anything overseas is a lot more. He said, "Why<br />
don't you just make MP3 files out of it?" Because, they're WAV<br />
files, the way they are now. I go, "OK."<br />
<br />
This is very recent, like within the last couple of weeks, I<br />
downloaded some software, "Convert WAV to MP3," converted it, sent<br />
them the files. They said, "That's great." What I think what I'll<br />
probably do is try to figure out how I can make them available from<br />
a website.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You've apparently forgotten that, like, 10 years ago, I did that.<br />
They're there.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. I know.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They're at vintagecomputermusic.com.<br />
<br />
David: Are they MP3s?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Well, then, I don't have to do it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You dummy.<br />
<br />
David: Bam. I did remember. I didn't know that you did them all. I thought<br />
you did a sample.<br />
<br />
Kevin: No. They're all there. I can see you're getting reflux.<br />
<br />
David: Boom. I wasted a little time. I waste a lot of time, these days.<br />
That was a cool thing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just think it was neat that you guys were willing to take chances<br />
with weird stuff.<br />
<br />
David: Where we took chances with really weird stuff was in the software.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Software publishing?<br />
<br />
David: We had a brand called, Sensational Software. Unfortunately, Ziff<br />
decided it was competing with some potential advertisers, which it<br />
was, in a sense. They killed it off. But, we had some really good<br />
stuff. We had the Apple game, what the heck was it? It was ported<br />
directly over from the arcade games.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Was it, "Space Invaders"?<br />
<br />
David: "Space Invaders."<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was a clone of, "Space Invaders"?<br />
<br />
David: It was the real.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You got it from, Jeff Lee's guy.<br />
<br />
David: Because, "Space Invaders," the Japanese game, was one of the first<br />
full-sized console video games where they used a general-purpose<br />
chip. "Space Invaders," was programmed for the 6502, Apple.<br />
We bought it from this Japanese company, and we had the only real<br />
"Space Invaders" game. That was one, and a couple of others that we<br />
really could have gone places with. That was just about the time<br />
that Ziff came in and said, "Nah, you can't have this anymore."<br />
<br />
They were into printed media, so, they kept the books going, but,<br />
not any of the other stuff. The other thing we had, was, speaking<br />
of computer music, a little division, that probably could have<br />
gotten a lot bigger, called Peripherals Plus. We were marketing a<br />
little computer music board, it was an S-100 bus once. But if we<br />
had then...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Didn't we have a plotter, too?<br />
<br />
David: Yep. We had about five or six interesting, low-level products. But,<br />
again, Ziff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That stuff was really competing with the advertisers.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Obviously, that wasn't our intent. But, yes it was. We also<br />
offered courses at that time. Do you remember, at County College?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't.<br />
<br />
David: That was just at when we moved into the new building at Hanover. We<br />
had two people that were doing that.<br />
<br />
Betsy: One of them was that crazy, Larry guy. He was seriously weird.<br />
<br />
David: County College of Morris, we reached an agreement that we would<br />
teach their Introductory Computer course. Not for their day<br />
students, but they offered evening courses, adult education, we<br />
were doing that. Fingers in a lot of pies, at that point.<br />
Actually, from that standpoint, it was, probably, good that Ziff<br />
got us a little bit more focused, and back to the roots of<br />
publishing. Getting spread a little thin.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You went to Atari, got the Atari game, and you did the "Atari<br />
Explorer," right?<br />
<br />
David: "Atari Explorer." They had had an occasional publication, not<br />
really a magazine, but one that was focused on the games, and they<br />
decided that they could start that one up again. It started up with<br />
a new name. We called it, "Atarian." It was focused, basically, on<br />
video games. You buy one of their video games and you get an issue.<br />
Anyway, there were different ways that they were going to promote<br />
it.<br />
But, a year later Nintendo just, absolutely, buried "Atarian," in<br />
'89. They kept Atari Spore going for, I think, two more issues,<br />
right?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Was it two?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember the details.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't much.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I remember why they killed it.<br />
<br />
David: Ms. Feisty here. Come on. You've got to tell the story here.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They were playing games with our printer. Production schedule.<br />
Everybody had a production schedule. We never missed our production<br />
date, getting things to the printer, getting them mailed. We just<br />
did it because that's what you had to do. I will probably get sued<br />
for this. Atari started not paying the printer and the printer says<br />
we're not going to print this until we get paid. The date kept<br />
slipping and slipping and the subscribers would be calling up and<br />
saying, "Where's my magazine?"<br />
This went on for.. it was bi-monthly. It went on for maybe six months. I<br />
finally wrote an editorial in which I explained to the readers<br />
exactly what was going on. They didn't see it until it was printed.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
David: That didn't get into the magazine, though.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It did.<br />
<br />
David: That's right, it did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They never saw it. We were producing it out of Mendham<br />
New Jersey and printing it in eastern Pennsylvania and they never<br />
saw it until it was too late. My tenure was cut short but I didn't<br />
really care at that point. I was sick of them. It was really hard.<br />
They're not easy people to deal with, even when the owners last for<br />
more than three months. That was my suicide by editorial. The only<br />
time in my life I've ever been fired.<br />
<br />
David: I didn't realize they didn't read that beforehand but I should<br />
have. I should have.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] I probably wouldn't have gotten fired if they had.<br />
<br />
David: That was kinda the straw that broke the camel's back.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But then John Jainschigg kept doing it a little bit.<br />
<br />
David: I know. In a lot of cases, particularly with the games magazine,<br />
they wanted to approve everything that went in it. If you do an<br />
objective product review, you call it like it is. Oh my gosh, there<br />
was one, it wasn't just one product but a roundup after Consumer<br />
Electronics' show, and I don't remember what it was. Atari had<br />
brought out some new products that really weren't ready to go.<br />
In some cases I just said, "I'm not going to say anything about<br />
this one or these two or three. I'll focus on the ones that are<br />
ready to go or are in good shape." Oh my gosh. "What about this?<br />
This is a wonderful thing." "Well, maybe it will be but it isn't<br />
yet." We had issues all along on censorship and them changing what<br />
we had written and everything. As Betsy said, they were not nice<br />
people to work with. I forget, the two brothers.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Trammell.<br />
<br />
David: Trammell, yeah. That came from Commodore.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Jack and somebody else. Jack and his brother.<br />
<br />
David: It was interesting because yesterday I saw Nolan Bushnell. He was<br />
at that event. Nolan was flamboyant, but basically he had integrity<br />
and he was an honest guy. Man, oh man. Didn't stay and the<br />
corporation changed after he left.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Then you're done with Atari and then it's straight to military<br />
vehicles there?<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] No.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was a hiatus.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, man. We published magazines, in-house magazines, for a couple<br />
other organizations. Did one for Nabisco called...I don't even<br />
remember but it was for their marketing department. Published that<br />
for some period of time and then they decided to bring it in-house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was more like a newsletter.<br />
<br />
David: It was 16 pages. It was getting there.<br />
<br />
Betsy: 16 pages is a newsletter.<br />
<br />
David: All right. Magazine format. Let's put it that way. We did some<br />
fulfillment. Basically, a lot of freelance writing on the travel<br />
field.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Stuffed dogs. The stuffed dogs. Remember those four dogs for my<br />
brother?<br />
<br />
David: That's fulfillment. Fulfillment for Con Edison. I published a<br />
couple newsletters for a while, one called "Effective Investing"<br />
and one called "Effective Communication" for writers. We're talking<br />
early '90s.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was when people still cared, thought that there might be a<br />
correct way to do something and they wanted to know what it was.<br />
<br />
David: That was focused on "Take this computer and start to use it as a<br />
tool. Don't be afraid of the thing." '91/'92 not everybody was<br />
using a computer yet or a personal computer. That was the<br />
orientation of that. Then the other thing we got into big time was<br />
we'd been involved with a local rescue mission for men with drug,<br />
alcohol, homeless issues and we were writing and producing their<br />
newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We were producing all of their fundraising material.<br />
<br />
David: We started, I think, with the newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, we did everything. Appeal letters and newsletters and<br />
maintaining their database, the donor database. It took a lot of<br />
time.<br />
<br />
David: We did that for five years. Then '96 I got an opportunity to buy<br />
this crazy military vehicles magazine for people that were<br />
restoring old historic military vehicles. It was a magazine but it<br />
was I guess more of a glorified newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was horrible.<br />
<br />
David: It was horrible but it was really terrible. In fact, the editor or<br />
the publisher, whatever, the owner, he'd take the articles however<br />
the writer would send them. If it was double spaced type, boom,<br />
that's what would appear in the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Save all the typesetting.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He had zero typesetting expense.<br />
<br />
David: Zero editing. He just took anything that came in, put it in. Ads<br />
the same way. Half the ads were hand written. Well, not half, but a<br />
significant number had corrections on them by hand. Oh my gosh. It<br />
was so terrible. I made it into a real magazine and built it up. At<br />
that point the circulation had been about 10,000. We built it up<br />
and we were pushing close to 20,000 magazines. It was a real<br />
magazine. I sold it to Crowsey publications.<br />
Then they, which I did not realize at the time, the owner, Chet<br />
Crowsey, had put the whole company up for sale and he sold the<br />
company a year or two later to some other specialty magazine<br />
publisher. We're talking narrow, narrow niche. They published a lot<br />
of, what'd they call it, white tail bow hunting. Really, really<br />
narrow stuff. Up in northern Wisconsin is where they were based. In<br />
any event, he sold it.<br />
<br />
The new publishers, their whole stick was making money. They<br />
immediately raised the subscription price of military vehicles. We<br />
were charging $18 a year which was fine and they raised it to<br />
$21.95 or something and they raised the advertising rates and<br />
everything else.<br />
<br />
The last I knew, the circulation was back down around 10,000.<br />
[laughs] It doesn't pay off to take that approach. I didn't have<br />
the same emotional connection, with that as I did with Creative<br />
Computing and the other magazines there. But it, fine, you do what<br />
you want with the magazine, it's OK.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You didn't care too much?<br />
<br />
David: Nah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So, what do you guys do now? It seems like charity work and [inaudible<br />
01:18:45] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. I run a non-profit called Beyond the Walls, and he runs his<br />
website and does Bible studies.<br />
<br />
David: Right. Actually, Betsy, the organization she has, she's executive<br />
director of Beyond the Wall, that's gotten huge.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's getting bigger and bigger.<br />
<br />
David: It's gotten huge.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think huge is probably an exaggeration.<br />
<br />
David: Well, not huge like a Gates Foundation thing.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I wish. We started in 2005 with 26 volunteers going to Guatemala to<br />
work with this organization that works with the people who scavenge<br />
in the Guatemala City garbage dump. The dump is in a ravine. It<br />
started in the early '50s and as it has filled up around the edges<br />
they put a couple layers of sand on it and let it sit for a bit and<br />
then the people build houses on it out of scraps and things that<br />
they made.<br />
This organization called Potter's House that we work with has been<br />
working with them for 26 years. They have an education program,<br />
micro-enterprise and health and various things that they do. Since<br />
2005 we've been sending volunteer teams. We're not the only ones<br />
sending volunteer teams down there to build houses and do<br />
healthcare and do stuff with the kids. So we started with 26 and by<br />
the end of the year we'll be well over 150 volunteers. We'll have<br />
three weeks this summer, I'll have 135 over three weeks this<br />
summer.<br />
It started in our backyard and one of the reasons that we wanted<br />
to...It started in the church and we started the organization<br />
partially because it's easier to raise money if you're not a church<br />
and it's also easier to make the volunteer opportunities available<br />
to people. If you say "Oh I'm going to Guatemala." "Oh I'd love to<br />
go with you! Who's going?" "It's my church." "Oh."<br />
But, if it's this local non-profit it's more appealing and we've<br />
really succeeded in doing that because we have people not only from<br />
in our own community, but this year we're going to have a family<br />
from Oklahoma, about six families from Texas, several people from<br />
Florida.<br />
<br />
David: You got the Virginia.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Virginia. It's like oh my goodness, how is this happening?<br />
<br />
Kevin: And everyone goes out to Guatemala and does the [inaudible<br />
01:22:31] ?<br />
[cross talk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. We all meet in Guatemala. I have three teams. One each week,<br />
and I'll be there the whole time and they'll come down and probably<br />
each team will build two or three houses. They'll do medical<br />
clinic, they'll do day camp for kids, soccer or baseball, sports<br />
things.<br />
They were about teenagers, so they love to do the...Everybody does<br />
construction in the morning. Then, in the afternoon teenage girls<br />
and some of the boys who want to do other stuff will help out with<br />
these other kid-related activities. That's what I'm doing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My wife is in Africa this week and last doing something similar.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Cool.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Which is why I have to leave shortly to go get my kids.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: What part of Africa is she in?<br />
<br />
Kevin: She did some stuff for Special Olympics. Then, they were helping<br />
build something at a food bank. I don't know that much yet, because<br />
she's not home yet.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Cool.<br />
<br />
David: That's terrific. She'll be changed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: She keeps telling that she wished I could've come, and I do, too.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You have this kid. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: We've got the two kids. The six-year-old doesn't feed herself real<br />
well.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: She can't drive to school.<br />
<br />
David: Your annual budget has gone from 0 to what? Are you going to hit<br />
about 150, 200,000 this year?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's over 300 already.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, OK. [laughs] 300.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's small potatoes compared to, say...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, but in six, seven years...<br />
<br />
Betsy: As my boss, the Chairman of the Board, and I'm the only employee,<br />
is fond of saying, "The people out there don't realize that we're<br />
just a bunch of schlumps sitting around a table making this stuff<br />
up as we go along. Very good leadership. He's a very good leader.<br />
<br />
David: We were trying to maybe see if we can touch base with the Gates<br />
Foundation when we were up there. Of course... [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: We got a brochure into his hands.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we got a brochure into his hands and some other stuff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was Bill Gates there?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah. I had a picture of him that I had taken at the first<br />
Altair convention in 1976, before he had actually made the deal<br />
with Altair to develop BASIC, well he had said, "I can do it," but<br />
they hadn't signed the whole thing. I've got a picture of him as<br />
a 20-year-old or thereabouts, talking at this little convention.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You showed it to him?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. I gave him a copy of it. The problem I had is that...some<br />
people keep everything. I pretty much give everything away.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, you are lying. You keep everything.<br />
<br />
David: I do keep a lot of stuff. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Then, you give it away later. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Well, when Stan Freiberger was putting together the "Fire in<br />
the Valley" book, I gave him a lot of photographs and I gave him<br />
the originals. Then the publisher said, "It's not good enough. The<br />
photo. You get the negative." OK, they're gone. Never any of that<br />
came back. In fact, what I had to do is scan the photo from the<br />
book to make the print to give to Bill.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Photos of being young and cute.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was his Woody Allen phase. He looked exactly like Woody Allen<br />
did at that phase in his life.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:26:30] too.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm sure there is.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Its got a lot smaller.<br />
<br />
David: She improves with age. Every year.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I saw the picture! You look the same.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, the instant Paul Allen showed up, of course, everybody's<br />
mingling around this museum. All of a sudden there was like an<br />
arrow head over in that direction.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was this sucking sound.<br />
<br />
David: And that wasn't even... then Bill shows up and, oh my God, everybody<br />
has to go see Bill.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was talking to Bob Rynett this morning, the guy who organized it,<br />
and he said, "Oh, Paul was very happy. Paul was very pleased with<br />
the way the event went." He said his only regret was that he and<br />
Bill didn't have enough time to spend with the people. And I'm<br />
thinking, "Well, OK, if you just stayed a little longer."<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Well, at least Paul Allen did come to the dinner.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, he stayed a little longer, but Bill, he was in and out like<br />
a...<br />
<br />
David: Bill was there for maybe an hour.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He just showed up because he had to.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, exactly. It was a cameo.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was this your cameo there?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, yes. There I am. I was thinner then. Oh! There's Ted in his<br />
hat! And Peter Fee! Who's that guy?<br />
<br />
David: Dick Heiser was at the convention and he had one of the hats, a<br />
Xanadu hat.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was wearing one of those hats. The rings were actually silver.<br />
Oh and there's Johnny Anderson. He's the one that wrote that<br />
crazy...<br />
<br />
Oh, and this was our building.<br />
<br />
David: That was the greenhouse garage building that we started. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: And there was a hole. Was it you or my brother that made a hole in<br />
the wall for an air conditioner?<br />
<br />
David: It was your brother.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And the building was painted white after...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is that the air conditioner? You comment about the low tech air<br />
conditioning.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, that was in an actual window. This building had been painted<br />
white after and right about here a hole had been made in the wall<br />
for this through-the-wall air conditioner. It was rented and when<br />
we moved out, we had this hole in the wall. So, my brother takes<br />
this spare ceiling panel that we had. It was white and sort of<br />
stuffed it in the hole and filled it up so that it really didn't<br />
show any more. We never heard any more about it.<br />
<br />
David: That building today is...<br />
<br />
Betsy: They've made it very fancy.<br />
<br />
David: Oh my gosh! It's a boutique shop and it's really nice. And they<br />
didn't even tear it down. It wasn't a tear-down and rebuild. At any<br />
event, we were not into spending money on facilities. Absolutely<br />
not. The last place that we were in was a printing company had<br />
owned it and they had taken three very small houses that backed up<br />
to railroad tracks and then they built a large warehouse at the end<br />
that was relatively modern. Then they just connected the three<br />
houses with little walkway and so we were in the first house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You couldn't tell that it was two houses.<br />
<br />
David: No. The art department was in the second, then the software group<br />
was in the third one. We had our fulfillment and storage and stuff<br />
in the warehouse.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How much money did you spend on the facility?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not much.<br />
<br />
David: We were spending money on expansion, growing, grow, grow. Then Ziff<br />
Davis comes in, they say, "You got this wonderful warehouse."<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's our warehouse now, right?<br />
<br />
David: That's right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It wasn't though, because you owned it.<br />
<br />
David: I know, but in any event, they said we're going to use it. We're<br />
moving some of your operation, advertising, sales into New York,<br />
therefore you will have more space. It wasn't the trade-off of the<br />
same kind of space or anything. What they did is, they have all<br />
these other magazines at that point, things like "Popular Boating"<br />
and "Yachting" and everything else. All of those magazines, when<br />
you subscribed you got a premium. You got a tote bag or something.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A backpack or a cushion.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. They moved all of their premium fulfillment out to our<br />
warehouse. They said, "Because you're not going to have a software<br />
department anymore, so you won't have to ship any software. We're<br />
going to bring all of our premiums out there." We still have<br />
"Yachting" bags.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yachting bags and seat bags.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Speaking of fulfillment that was something that we did. We were<br />
real pioneers in doing our own fulfillment.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: That's true...<br />
<br />
Betsy: All magazines then used fulfillment houses. You would just send all<br />
the little cards and white mail and everything to your fulfillment<br />
house and they would just take care, enter it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Reader service cards and...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Exactly, and then they would send the labels.<br />
<br />
David: Everything went either to Boulder, Colorado, Des Moines, Iowa, or<br />
some place in Florida.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So when you say pioneers, does that mean you were cheap?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well no, because we were not getting good service, we weren't happy<br />
with the service the readers were getting. And so we decided to<br />
bring it in it house, and we brought a program from a company in<br />
Boston that had written a program to run a PDP-11.<br />
<br />
And we did we brought the whole thing in-house. We had our own data<br />
entry people. Did all the caging, taking the money out in-house.<br />
Printed our own labels and ship, because then you had to print them<br />
and ship them because there was no electronic delivery.<br />
<br />
David: You know we were real pioneers there and we did spent some money.<br />
Because PDP-11/70 was not a low-end, with a platter and disk, 12<br />
inch, maybe 15 inch, but a big, big platter drive, and data entry<br />
terminals, DECWriters, VT05. And when Ziff came in, I mean they<br />
were blown away that we were doing our own fulfillment, and doing a<br />
very efficiently.<br />
<br />
And the other thing we were doing also was the reader service<br />
cards. We were doing all our own processing of that. The same<br />
computer is same system. A Mini Data System, that's what it was.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No.<br />
<br />
David: No? OK.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mini data was the one you were using...<br />
<br />
<br />
[Day 2]<br />
<br />
<br />
David: A couple of the questions you asked yesterday got us to thinking<br />
about things we probably should have mentioned or clarified.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK let's go, let me grab a pen.<br />
<br />
David: One of the corrections, Betsy remembered better than I, that the<br />
embezzlement that we were talking about was actually 79 not 78 it<br />
doesn't make a lot of difference but was a year later. It was a<br />
year after I had left my day job, and I was really depending upon<br />
Creative Computing for my income and everything else. So to lose<br />
that was a big blow at that time. So that was...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So that could have put an end to things right there?<br />
<br />
David: Yes absolutely it could have.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was 79 not 78, is what you're saying.<br />
<br />
David: That's what I said it was 79 not 78.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I was going to ask you to move closer to the microphone.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Actually I don't have to do this. My ego is completely uninvolved.<br />
I would go sit and play with the cats.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Please, please be here. You supplement Dave's memory.<br />
<br />
David: Yes exactly, she's very good at that.<br />
<br />
David: And you were there and have some very good stories...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
<br />
[clipped out of audio?]<br />
Betsy: I want to know, how are you going to know how to spell things? He<br />
used the name John Dilks. If you go to write it out, how do you<br />
know how to spell John Dilks?<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'll either Google it, and if it's not in Wikipedia, I'll have to<br />
come back to you and ask, or if they're mentioned in the magazines.<br />
I'll do my best.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm not saying it in a critical way, I'm just impressed that you<br />
don't ask.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just feel this way, I can have everything. I don't have to write<br />
it down. I can concentrate on the conversation, rather than taking<br />
notes.<br />
[restarts]<br />
<br />
<br />
David: OK. One thing I thought would be kind of worthwhile...putting the<br />
whole era of the early computer magazines into a perspective. In a<br />
sense, personal computing itself went through several eras as it<br />
accelerated and became so widespread. It certainly didn't start<br />
that way.<br />
You almost have to look at a period before there were personal<br />
computers -- the pre-personal computer era, which I would say would<br />
be 1972 or so up through '75, when the first computers came out.<br />
<br />
And what was happening then was you had big time-sharing systems.<br />
But then, manufacturers like DEC and HP were making smaller time-<br />
sharing systems for terminals on a computer. Specifically, Bob<br />
Albrecht opened up People's Computer Company down in San Carlos,<br />
San Mateo, one of the "Sans." It was an open to the public place.<br />
What were people going to do with computers? Well, he wrote this<br />
book of What To Do After You Hit Return, of games.<br />
<br />
Then I wrote my book, not for his center, but for people in the<br />
east that had access to the same type of things on DEC computers.<br />
Those two books actually came out in '72, so that was well<br />
before....There was an impetus for people to use computers. Even<br />
though it was mini-computers and they didn't really have their own,<br />
they did have access.<br />
<br />
So that, I think, was an important thing because, then, when the kit<br />
computers first came out, which is '75, we really had the kit<br />
computer era from '75 to around '78. That's when it primary was,<br />
the do-it-yourself, build-it-yourself.<br />
<br />
Well who did those computers appeal to? It was largely people who <br />
were OK with things like soldering guns and that was largely HAM radio<br />
people. You look at "73" magazine and "Radio Electronics," those<br />
were the ones that dragged the hardware people into the field, and<br />
"Popular Electronics," of course, with the Altair in January, '75.<br />
<br />
You had to know something about, and be a little bit capable with<br />
your hands to get into it. That continued but dwindled off by 1980,<br />
because of course, in '78, you had the three biggies, not biggies,<br />
but self-contained, assembled computers: the Commodore PET, TRS-80,<br />
and the Apple all came out in '78. They were proprietary platforms,<br />
nobody was sharing stuff.<br />
<br />
Actually, the S-100 bus was more shareable. More people got a card<br />
that you could plug into the S-100 bus. There was more, but on the<br />
other hand, you had to build it. That was really a stumbling block<br />
for a lot of people. Then Processor Technology with the SOL. OK,<br />
here's an S-100 bus machine, but it's all built. That was a big<br />
leap.<br />
<br />
Anyway, you had the, what I call, proprietary era from '78 to '82.<br />
Then it kind of dwindled off, although Apple certainly kept going.<br />
When the IBM PC came out, '81, '82, '83, that ushered in the<br />
standardization era. Everybody, "OK, we're going to make an IBM PC<br />
clone." It was really only Apple, and to a lesser extent, the Atari<br />
and the Commodore that kept going with their own proprietary stuff.<br />
They really couldn't keep going.<br />
<br />
At that time, we started working with Atari. They using the same<br />
chip that Apple had. I thought, "Man, that's an opportunity. Why<br />
don't they just make an agreement with Apple to run Apple software<br />
and everything." They got a 6502, that family of chips in there,<br />
why not? But that wasn't Atari's way of doing things, as you well<br />
know.<br />
<br />
In any event, they went through those stages. As a new one came<br />
along, the other one died off. That though then affected the<br />
magazines, Creative Computing, we came from the pre-era, in a<br />
sense. From the education applications and people having access to<br />
small, minicomputer time sharing systems. When Altair basic was<br />
announced, then it was the obvious thing that we would port over<br />
programs to that.<br />
<br />
Other magazines such as "Byte" and some of the hardware magazines,<br />
they really came from the HAM radio end of things. Wayne Green, who<br />
started "Byte," was publishing "73," which was the biggest magazine<br />
in HAM radio. HAM fests were one of the earliest places where<br />
computers were, or at least hardware, do-it-yourself computers were<br />
really seen and popularized. Wasn't till a little later that we had<br />
computer festivals.<br />
<br />
The real early computer festivals in '75, '76, had a big overlap<br />
with Ham radio. The early ones in New Jersey. That was the earliest<br />
ones. It was, I think, more, not more, but at least half was<br />
oriented to Ham radio. Then, it broadened out, of course, with more<br />
applications being reproduced. Anyway, I think it's kind of<br />
important to know how things fit into that whole scheme of things.<br />
<br />
Magazines either came from the Ham radio and hardware side of<br />
things. They had a different perspective than those like Creative<br />
Computing.<br />
<br />
Well, Peoples' Computer Company, Bob Aldberg, could have had a real<br />
winning magazine, but he was too much in the alternative mode. So,<br />
Peoples' Computer Company never really made it as a magazine. He<br />
didn't want to do advertising or anything that would...<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was a different avenue. It was more like a tabloid-style<br />
newspaper.<br />
<br />
David: Newspaper, yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was more glossy.<br />
<br />
David: Exactly.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was a very different field.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Again, magazine publishing. I remember, early on, I was on a<br />
TV show, McNeil Lehrer Report on Public Broadcasting. Life Magazine<br />
was being re-launched and Time-Warner was spending a ton of money<br />
on this re-launch. They had the publisher of Life Magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was probably Time-Life back then. I don't think it...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. That's right. It wasn't Time. Well, I think it was close to<br />
the time that they merged. Anyway. Yeah. It was Time-Life. Then,<br />
they had me. Sort of the opposite extreme.<br />
<br />
<br />
[clipped out of audio?]<br />
Kevin: You're going to be covered in cat hair by the time you're here.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, I am sure.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's OK. But it matches and sort of goes with it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. It matches fine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You have kind of a theme here. The black and white.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes. Yes. Sorry to interrupt.<br />
[restarts]<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, they were interviewing both of us. They were going to spend<br />
more money on their first issue than our entire annual budget, for<br />
everything. The difference in big publishers, because we we're<br />
talking about that a little bit yesterday, is huge. Really huge.<br />
Now, the interesting thing is there was a magazine back then. I<br />
don't know if it's still around today, called Folio. It was a<br />
magazine for magazine publishers. They covered all aspects of it.<br />
Subscription fulfillment, typesetting and everything else and the<br />
business aspects of running a magazine.<br />
<br />
They had some figures, which were true for a long period of time.<br />
That one out of seven magazine startups makes it for one year. One<br />
out of seven. That's low. Of those, one out of seven makes it for<br />
five years. So, were talking about...<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think Wayne told me almost the exact same statistic.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. One out of 50 new magazines makes it for five years or more.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: Once you make it five years, you're probably good to go for awhile.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
The new Life Magazine comes back, roaring back in. Where are they<br />
today, or even 10 years later from that point. Gone. Didn't make<br />
it. In any event, yesterday we were talking a little bit about<br />
where did we put all our money.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
David: Well, all our money wasn't an awful lot compared to big publishers.<br />
We were a small player. We're big in that field, but...<br />
<br />
Kevin: You're a big fish in a little bowl.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Yeah. There wasn't a lot. Betsy reminded me this morning that<br />
one of the things we did to, in a sense, keep control, is we bought<br />
our own typesetting equipment.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Used of course.<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Used.<br />
<br />
David: Used. Yes, yes. We didn't want to send stuff out to a typesetter<br />
where... what did you you call it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was the same thing with the fulfillment. You are sending it to a<br />
service that gives your work to a minimum wage person who couldn't<br />
care less. Puts her time in and...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Plus you still had code and things that needed to be done right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Done right. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Otherwise it was useless.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. We didn't typeset the code usually. We would actually pace<br />
down the printouts. Part of it was for efficiency and probably, in<br />
the long run, it was cheaper. Just to turn your typesetting around,<br />
send it out and wait for your galleys to come back. Then you<br />
proofread them. Then you'd send it back. Then they make the<br />
corrections, maybe, and you get it back again. So we said, well...and<br />
then we got this used, CompuGraphic was it?<br />
<br />
David: Mm-hmm. Yep.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Typesetter. Found a young woman who knew typesetting and hired her.<br />
We bought our own stat camera. We always used to have to send all<br />
the stats and V-Luxes out to be made.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: That was huge then before...<br />
<br />
Betsy: ...had our own darkroom.<br />
<br />
David: ...there was computerized publishing. Yeah. We had our own<br />
darkroom and our own stat camera with the thing that goes over a<br />
screen basically to make it into dots.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: a...nd to do that. To make those negatives or V-Luxes, which<br />
are the positive. That was something again. You sent it out and you<br />
get it back.<br />
<br />
I said, "Oh, you know what, we got a little more type here than<br />
expected. We want to crop this." Well, we send it out again, and oh<br />
my gosh. Doing all of that in-house, but it cost money. In a<br />
sense, just for the hardware and capital improvements that you<br />
needed to do that.<br />
<br />
We were spending it on that and expansion into other things like<br />
the software. One of the other ones that I was thinking of that we<br />
did, that certainly, really didn't bring us any tangible reward,<br />
was that we were doing some consulting when we started developing<br />
software. We started doing consulting to places like the<br />
Exploratorium in San Francisco. And Sesame Place. That was a big<br />
one for us.<br />
<br />
Sesame Place was a theme park right in our own backyard in New<br />
Jersey. They were going to have these terminals that you could go<br />
up to. One of the programs was Mix and Match the Muppets. You could<br />
take different parts of Muppets and combine them. We wrote a part<br />
of that routine and a whole bunch of stuff that made computers and<br />
these things not computers but approachable things for kids.<br />
<br />
We did some work for the Capital Children's Museum in Washington<br />
and Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Again, did it help us?<br />
Maybe. Did we gain a little reputation? Maybe. Did it translate to<br />
the bottom line? Probably not. As Betsy said, it was fun for you to<br />
do that, wasn't it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, it was fun. It gave him fun things to do.<br />
<br />
David: That was one way that we, in a sense, spent some money.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It makes sense. You guys were the computer experts, probably by<br />
orders of magnitude. Who are they going to go to?<br />
<br />
David: That's right. Interactive games, yeah. I already had a good selling<br />
book out there that was visible, known. We did a lot of that kind<br />
of stuff. Some of it was just fun to do. Another place where we put<br />
I won't say a lot of money but we went to a lot of these shows,<br />
well, there were some that were strictly personal computer shows,<br />
but then also tried to push into things like the consumer<br />
electronics show.<br />
<br />
We were the only magazine at the consumer electronics. That's a<br />
huge, huge show. Twice a year, one in Chicago and one in Las Vegas.<br />
We'd take the smallest booth that you could but, still, it was a<br />
fair chunk of change to go to that, but that's how I felt we got<br />
the reach. They were pushing at a lower level. That was video games<br />
mostly at that point. Although we weren't in that market, I just<br />
felt that that was someplace that we wanted to be.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you think that was worthwhile?<br />
<br />
David: I don't know. We were mainly looking for retail stores to sell the<br />
magazine. That was my main purpose for going there. No, it probably<br />
wasn't. It probably was not and it cost us a lot of money to go to<br />
the shows. You have to experiment and do those things. We started<br />
reporting on new developments at the consumer electronics show and<br />
there was some overlap with computers but it was mostly video<br />
games. No, it didn't have a real good payoff. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Then there was the Boston show we went to where Betsy's feistiness<br />
really came out. You go to those shows. I'm not talking about one<br />
of these local computer shows or something. You go to a big show.<br />
You've got to use union labor. We had a computer at our booth. We<br />
wanted to plug it in. You're going to plug in your computer? No,<br />
you can't plug it in. You've got to hire an electrician for an hour<br />
for $75 to plug in your computer.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was a bit extreme. I don't think that was actually true.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know how much it was but you had to use union labor for<br />
different things. Betsy took exception to that at one show and<br />
actually came to blows.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was carrying stuff off the show floor. We were trying to get out.<br />
It was in Boston and we were going to drive back and we were trying<br />
to...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Go home at the end of the show?<br />
<br />
Betsy: ...go home at the end of the show. We were just carrying our<br />
cartons of leftover magazines and books and some union guy comes to<br />
me and starts telling me you can't do this and he was being very<br />
rude. So I punched him in the arm. [laughs] They were not happy.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you have to hire a special punching person to do that?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yes, exactly. I should have consulted with the shop steward before<br />
doing that.<br />
<br />
David: There was a follow-up to that. I'm not absolutely sure but I think<br />
the guy that was running that show was Shelley Adelman. He then<br />
approached us after that little incident. You can't do this. Betsy<br />
was really in his face about come on. We're a tiny little nit. Sure<br />
we can do it. We can carry our own stuff.<br />
<br />
Shelley Adelman, whose name you probably heard today, in a sense,<br />
got his start by running these smaller shows around the country and<br />
then he built up to running PC Expo in New York and Las Vegas and<br />
then he got into you run a show in Las Vegas you've got to make<br />
deals with the hotels and so on.<br />
<br />
The earlier PC shows in Las Vegas did not use the convention<br />
center. They were held in I think probably the Hilton. He got to<br />
know hotel people there and he started buying into hotels and today<br />
Shelley Adelman is huge. Not Caesars but he owns one of the really<br />
big casino operations. He's on Forbes list of top 100 wealthiest<br />
Americans.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sure he only uses union labor.<br />
<br />
David: I'm sure he does, absolutely. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's how he got where he is.<br />
<br />
David: We've crossed paths with some interesting people in different ways.<br />
There was another one I was thinking of. Actually, this is jumping<br />
around a little bit. Editorial, in different people submitting<br />
articles and then some people I would ask would you do something<br />
for us early, early on. That's another thing we went to. I went to<br />
comic cons and the sci-fi cons to promote the magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was early.<br />
<br />
David: That was early, very early. I've got to tell you one little<br />
incident there. I also went to small press publisher conventions. I<br />
went to one over Labor Day weekend, and I don't know what year it<br />
was. It was probably '75, '76 maybe. The place that they gave this<br />
small press to exhibit was one platform up in the subway under<br />
Lincoln Center.<br />
<br />
Lincoln Center, of course, huge, but down one level is not shops.<br />
There may be a few shops but it was a big, open platform. That's<br />
where we were exhibiting. I had my magazines out there on a table<br />
and I was talking to these other underground publishers and so on,<br />
typical.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's why they put you there. It's underground.<br />
<br />
David: Underground, yes. It was a Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Saturday,<br />
Sunday, Monday. I said, "I can't be here on Sunday." Talked to the<br />
person next to me and I said, "I'm just going to leave a cigar box<br />
that says put your money in the box." He said, "You're nuts. We're<br />
in a New York subway system. You're going to come back with nothing<br />
in your box." I left a bunch of change in it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: And your ex-wife said you were too trusting.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] Yes. I left like 15 single dollar bills in there so people<br />
could make change and I just left it there, from Saturday to Monday<br />
and I came back Monday, about $40, $50 in the box. I don't know<br />
whether it paid for everything that was taken but it worked out<br />
fine. Yes, I was obviously too trusting, but at roughly the same<br />
time there was something going on. I think it was a sci-fi<br />
convention or world future society. Yeah, it was world future<br />
society convention.<br />
<br />
They had some notable people there. I was sitting down with Alvin<br />
Toffler in the lobby of the Colosseum and along comes over to us<br />
Isaac Asimov. What a wonderful little party. We had some coffee in<br />
the Colosseum and I said, "Isaac, can you write me an article?"<br />
"I got a good story from the I, Robot series that hasn't been widely<br />
used or published and you can use that." So I got an early <br />
contribution from Asimov and Alvin Toffler wrote something for us.<br />
<br />
Anyway, got to know some interesting people at that point. Then who<br />
should submit an article, and by this time Betsy was the editor...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Out of transom comes an article from Michael Creighton. It was a<br />
program. I can't remember what it was about.<br />
<br />
David: For the Apple.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was a program for the Apple, but it was something really dumb.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know if you remember, we were reminded when Harry Garland<br />
was up at the thing in Seattle. Harry Garland was one of the first<br />
ones to produce an independent manufactured a board, a S-100 bus<br />
board, for the Altair, and this was really early, and he called it<br />
the TV Dazzler. It made little squares light up but he could make<br />
lots of them light up in different colors or just a few. It was a<br />
silly program but people said, whoa, we can do graphics on this.<br />
<br />
He eventually developed it into quite an interesting graphics tool,<br />
I guess. People did buy the TV Dazzler for itself but the purpose<br />
was here's a board you could produce graphics, do some graphics.<br />
<br />
So in any event, that's essentially what Michael Creighton's program<br />
did for the Apple. Not much.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This was not early on.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, it was after the Apple 2 was out.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was probably...<br />
<br />
David: '80.<br />
<br />
Betsy: 1980, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So did you publish it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. I rejected it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: I'm like, my god, we're going to reject an article from Michael Creighton?<br />
<br />
Betsy: We both liked Michael Creighton as an author.<br />
<br />
David: Oh my gosh. But we did. We really did. We had standards.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Later on, though, he wrote something. It was better. It wasn't<br />
great, but he did write something better and we did accept it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Orson Scott Card wrote for Compute, I think. I don't know if he was<br />
Orson Scott Card yet at that point, but some flub who was writing,<br />
yeah. But who else?<br />
<br />
David: We've crossed paths with some people.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Michael Creighton was actually very nice.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, 6 foot 8, big guy. He was a very nice guy. Unfortunately, he<br />
died On the other end of things, early on, we really were...this was<br />
probably even before Betsy got in...kind of in the small press<br />
underground publishing movement as much as in the legitimate big<br />
magazines, because that's kind of where I started.<br />
<br />
Betsy: When I came, we had just published the first sleek, coated paper<br />
magazine and coated stock. In October 1978, I believe, that was<br />
published. That was the first one on coated stock. That was kind of<br />
the bridge to legitimacy.<br />
<br />
David: For the first two years, it was published on news print and I had<br />
a little tie in with some of the small press people. I was learning<br />
about publishing from small press review, and I got to know some of <br />
the people who were doing successful publishing. A lot of them were<br />
magazines and comics out of San Francisco.<br />
<br />
So I got to know a little bit... R. Crumb and Gilbert<br />
Shelton and Sherry Flannigan, and some of those early, Bobby<br />
London. So anyway, one ad we ran real early on was an adaptation of<br />
an add that Robert Crumb did. He said "Go ahead and change my thing<br />
to creative computing. Go for it." Sherry Flannigan she did a comic <br />
strip called Tronch and Bonnie, Tronch was a little dog and Bonnie<br />
was a little girl and they occasionally got mixed up with a robot dog.<br />
So I published that.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there some sort of falling out with that person?<br />
<br />
David: With Sherry? No. I'm still friends with her on Facebook. They had a<br />
major, major problem, she was involved with Gary Hallgrin and I<br />
forget who the publisher was, McNeil, Bobby London. They were the<br />
Air Pirates funniest group that Disney took to task, and really, oh<br />
my god, that caused the death of a lot of publishing in the underground<br />
comics movement.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I don't understand.<br />
<br />
David: Air Pirates were funny, they were just looking for trouble. They<br />
had Disney characters flying planes and getting into all kinds of<br />
trouble and getting into problems that Disney characters never<br />
would have done, sexual problems as well as just acting badly.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Disney just said, "We can't put up with this." It was an<br />
interesting case, because was it a copyright violation? Not really<br />
because they were character look-a-likes, but they weren't calling<br />
them Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck but they looked the same or very<br />
similar. But, it was a landmark case in the underground comics movement<br />
and it really caused a lot of them to pull back, a lot on the satire<br />
and stuff that they were publishing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I asked about Sherry because a number of years ago when I had first<br />
put the Best of Creative Computing books on my website, they were up<br />
for a while, then I got an email saying, "You have to take this content,<br />
these pages down... copyright violation", it was just like<br />
waving their arms. So I took it down but it was, I thought, maybe it<br />
was...<br />
<br />
David: Well that whole copyright trademark thing, there interpretations<br />
that go from really, really strict...everything that goes on the <br />
Internet is a public domain. Well, that is not really true either.<br />
Are you making money from copyrighted material? If you are then<br />
that's a pretty clear violation. Are you affecting the copyright<br />
owner's ability to make money with it? That's a violation.<br />
<br />
I'm kind of in this right now with Hergé and TinTin, those books<br />
have inspired a lot of people to make parodies and fake TinTin<br />
covers, you know, TinTin at the beach, you know, places TinTin<br />
wouldn't normally go. Well is it affecting the sales of TinTin books,<br />
or is it actually increasing them?<br />
<br />
Casterman, who owns, and Mulenard, own the TinTin copyrights.<br />
They are really going after some of these people, but I'm not<br />
sure that they have a really good case. So some people take<br />
everything off and want nothing on the website. And others<br />
are saying, "Hey, this is legitimate." I have collected a lot of<br />
those covers, and put them up on a website.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I guess you'll find out soon enough.<br />
<br />
David: I will find out, soon enough.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They may not be right legally, but how hard do you want to fight<br />
it.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: I think that they have to demonstrate that it's hurting them in<br />
some way. One last thing, from the question you asked yesterday,<br />
back to the money issue, where does the money go, well when I<br />
sold the magazine, right at that time I took 15 percent of what<br />
I had received, and donated it to charities. I have in a sense<br />
signed on, although not as an official signee, to the Gates-Buffet<br />
initiative to give away half of my wealth, while I am alive.<br />
<br />
At one point in time you can compute that, I have already given<br />
away more than I have received for Creative Computing to charity.<br />
Of course, it had grown a little bit and we made reasonably decent<br />
investments and it continues to grow. But, I'm really committed<br />
to doing that. My kids are not going to inherit it all. That's just<br />
the way it is, the way I believe. Put my money where my heart is.<br />
Anyway,<br />
<br />
Kevin: I have a question for you Betsy, you said something yesterday,<br />
I should follow up that one. You said something about stealing BASIC.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well there was this big thing. Just the night before last, at this<br />
dinner we went to, where all the people who were at the first MITS<br />
conference and they referred to the letter that Bill Gates wrote.<br />
<br />
Kevin: "Why are you stealing my software?"<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well exactly. That was just a reference to that Bill Gates, which<br />
had just been brought back to my memory by that. People were<br />
telling stories at this. Instead of having an after dinner speaker<br />
they were just passing the mic around and people were talking about<br />
incidents and things from the past.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you get to tell a story to this group of...?<br />
<br />
David: Not really, I just followed up on something Nolan Bushnell said.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Some of those stories were really boring.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: Oh yeah, long and boring.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Way too long.<br />
<br />
David: It's an interesting thing though, about basic itself, because, well<br />
it was developed at an educational institution originally by Kemeny<br />
and Kurtz at Dartmouth. And they, either deliberately or because they<br />
had gotten a lot of grant money from General Electric in the early time<br />
sharing systems, they basically let anybody use their Basic.<br />
<br />
So it was developed at Dartmouth but if GE, or later Ge/Honeywell,<br />
put a system in at Minnesota or Florida or someplace else. They could<br />
use Basic, they could have a no license fee or anything. That made Basic<br />
a universal language that was available, at least that version of<br />
Basic. <br />
<br />
Well then if you write a different version of Basic, where does that<br />
fall? These are some sort of violation and you need some<br />
permission. And basically Kemeny and Kurtz said, "No, you don't."<br />
<br />
[background noise due to cat]<br />
<br />
And they allowed Basic to be used and developed by others.<br />
<br />
Digital Equipment, at the same time, maybe even earlier, but<br />
roughly the same time, had developed also an interactive language<br />
called Focal. And Focal in many regards was more efficient than<br />
Basic, because they were running it on mini-computers and there was<br />
less memory to work with. On the other hand, and this was true<br />
Digital...as time went on, they said, "No, no no, nobody else can use<br />
Focal. We are not going to let, especially those people at Data General,<br />
but any place else, nobody could use Focal."<br />
<br />
I think it wound up with a situation like Sony and Betamax. Sony<br />
saying, "Betamax is ours and it is a better format that VHS," which<br />
it was, it definitely was. But then, JVC saying, "We have VHS. Ok Toshiba,<br />
hey do you want to use it? Fine, we'll license it to you for next to<br />
nothing."<br />
<br />
Kevin: You think Focal could have been Basic.<br />
<br />
David: I think it could have been very big. I think it could there could<br />
have been very serious competition between the two languages, but<br />
by Digital limiting it only to their own computers and specifically<br />
to their minicomputers, not even the big mainframes, it really<br />
limited the spread of Focal. In fact, it forced me, at DEC, to go<br />
out to the developers, and people in educational institutions they<br />
wanted Basic.<br />
<br />
There were a few schools and colleges in Boston area, near DEC that<br />
were OK with Focal. But stuff was getting published by Minnesota<br />
Educational Computer Consortium and others in Basic, and Huntington<br />
Computer Project. So they wanted Basic. [laughs] I had to<br />
go out, I hired one group, actually it turned out to be just an<br />
individual guy in Brooklyn that developed a Basic for 4K PDP-8. Well<br />
Basic took 3.5K, that gave you 500 words, 500 12 bit, not even<br />
16 bit, at least get 2 bytes per... but 500 words to write programs.<br />
Wasn't much.<br />
<br />
So that forced Lunar Lander and Hamurabi and some of those programs<br />
actually. Some of them I imported over from Focal into Basic. And<br />
then we had a machine that had 8K, we had a different version of Basic<br />
and then because Hewlett Packard had a machine that read cards, mark<br />
sense cards, we had to have a different version of basic for that.<br />
Then we had a timeshare Basic. We had six versions of Basic, five actually<br />
on the PDP-8 family. It was absurd, it was crazy, but well, we had to do it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I was going to ask you, kind of the process of like... you started<br />
saying... you interrupted yourself really, you said, "People would submit<br />
articles and then..." I don't know what you were going to say next.<br />
But it reminded me that I wanted to ask you like, kind of, just the<br />
process of how the magazine got made. You got an article was,<br />
I assume it was typed up or something and...<br />
<br />
Betsy: You mean the mechanics of the production?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We can receive most of the articles for the magazine came over the<br />
transom. And we would get these articles and our editorial assistant<br />
would log them in and pass them around to the editorial staff. John<br />
Anderson and Russ Lockwood and...<br />
<br />
David: Peter Fee.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Peter Fee.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What does that mean, over the transom?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Means they weren't solicited. Somebody in the middle of the night<br />
dumped them overboard [laughs] or through the mailbox. We put a little<br />
piece of paper on there and the guys would write their opinions.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] That is serious.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Some of the things they said. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Like what? What would they say?<br />
<br />
Betsy: "Don't quit your day job." [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: And then they had the rubber stamp.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Somebody found a stamp. Everything that we had was used, including<br />
our desk and everything. And somebody found, at the back of the<br />
desk, a stamp. It said San Marcos on it. This was like the ultimate<br />
insult. [laughs] San Marcos, like you know, "Get out of here."<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Send it to San Marcos?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Send it to San Marcos, wherever that was. Ultimately, I would make<br />
the final decision whether we were going to publish this or not.<br />
Once we were well established, the vast majority of them went back.<br />
We never returned manuscripts. And they would come with piles of<br />
code. A lot of them were programs and, then we would decide, and<br />
then it was the editorial assistants job to notify the person.<br />
Then we bought all rights, didn't we?<br />
<br />
David: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
Betsy: North American Serial rights, that's what we bought for everything.<br />
Then they would go into a queue. Sometimes we would say something,<br />
"Oh, this is going to go really well with this educational<br />
institute that we're doing in June," so slate that one for June, or<br />
just put it in the queue and we will see when it comes or rises to<br />
the top or whatever.<br />
<br />
The more technical editors like, John Anderson, he was our best guy<br />
ever... they would go through the code and make sure the code worked,<br />
and I would edit them for content and correct them.<br />
<br />
David: For English, for grammar.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, with a pen and pencil. Then they would go to our typesetter.<br />
Typesetter would correct them. And then they would come back, and I<br />
think, our lower level editorial assistant would proofread them,<br />
but proofread a lot of them too. When they came out typesetter, it<br />
was on a smooth shiny paper.<br />
<br />
David: Photographic paper.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And then, if they had screenshots or anything the art department<br />
would make them into photo stats or v-luxes. And then when it was<br />
time for them to go to press they would put them on boards, pieces<br />
of cardboard, white paper...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So like paste up?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, they do the paste up and put it on there.<br />
<br />
David: The boards were using non-reproducing blue on its photograph. They<br />
had different outlines, blue defined columns, both two and three<br />
column pages and upper limits and page numbers can go and all that kind of<br />
stuff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: We were still doing it in college newspaper in 1990.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well that's exactly it, so you know what we're talking about. And<br />
then once you get it all together and then again somebody has got<br />
to read it to make sure there is no lines left out, particularly of<br />
the programs. Make sure that those all still make sense. There were<br />
many cases where line got left out or artists cuts off the thing and<br />
realizes, "Oh, I mean to cut it shorter." and that little line<br />
disappears and then you send it off to be printed and all the<br />
subscribers get a little upset because Star Trek doesn't run.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: So that sort of thing happened infrequently, or often?<br />
<br />
David: With typeset material, not much at all. But with program listings,<br />
program listings were really tough. Because you would have people<br />
that would submit something, and they'd have a really cheap, low-<br />
end dot matrix printer. And we always encouraged people, if you're<br />
going to submit a program, submit it in some machine-readable form.<br />
We don't want to type them all in to make sure they work, even<br />
though our readers are going to have to, but we don't want to have<br />
to do that. So send us. But even so, we might then print it off on<br />
one of our slightly higher end printers. But I'll tell you what,<br />
you have page breaks and everything else. And the Art department<br />
didn't have a clue about programs and stuff. The program would get<br />
stated down. We weren't using the full sized type for program<br />
listings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. At that point we hadn't the ability to make them fit.<br />
<br />
David: That's where the most common place that you'd lose a line or<br />
something. It would get photographed, and when it's coming out of a<br />
line printer, you might have one or two lines on the following<br />
page. "Oh, we forgot that."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Personally, I know it said so much about magazine that when it<br />
continued, there were just sometimes a handwritten arrow going,<br />
"Continued over here." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Oh, absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was early.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It wasn't professional, and that was awesome. It was just like,<br />
"OK."<br />
<br />
Betsy: Then what we would do, we would request when we... we would solicit<br />
articles. Like if there was a new Apple peripheral that we wanted<br />
to review, we'd get the product. Then a lot of times, our own guys<br />
wanted to review the stuff, but if it was something that we didn't<br />
have time for, or that was better suited to one of our freelancers,<br />
we would send it out and ask for a review of it.<br />
<br />
A lot of reviews came in over the transom too, but we tried to be<br />
careful of those, that they were not either trying to justify their<br />
own purchase of whatever it was or get even with the publisher for<br />
producing it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Or written by the [ED: manufacturer]... [crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: That didn't really happen.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That really wasn't an issue at the time, it was a more innocent<br />
time. That really didn't happen much, but it was, sometimes, people<br />
would get a product they didn't care for and totally bash it, then<br />
we have to go and figure out is it really that bad. We tend to not<br />
produce seriously negative...if it was a really bad product we just<br />
ignored it.<br />
<br />
David: We tried to be objective with reviews, but before I got into the<br />
computer field at all I was in market research. There are a number<br />
of biases, too, that really overwhelmingly affect all kinds of<br />
market research, polls, or surveys. One is that people think they're<br />
better than they are. For example, if we were doing a poll or a<br />
research study, we'd put a question on basically designed to show<br />
the executives who were using this data that there were some<br />
biases.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He's not talking about Creative Computing.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: No, no, way earlier. I'm talking about Proctor and Gamble<br />
products or General Foods or that kind of thing. Anyways, the<br />
question we put on was "please rank your driving ability," and we<br />
had from well below average, accident waiting to happen up to Mario<br />
Andretti, Danica Patrick, over there. And you know what, 99 percent<br />
of the population ranked themselves better than the average. Where<br />
is your average then? Its way high.<br />
<br />
The other thing, equally pervasive in a sense, is that people<br />
wanted to justify a decision, a purchase decision. In fact, back<br />
the 30s, the slogan for Ford Motor Company was ask a man that owns<br />
one. You ask a man that owns and has made a decision to buy this<br />
car, he's going to say "Yeah, it is the greatest car." So you put<br />
on questions, again, throwaway questions.<br />
<br />
If you had this, or if you were an owner of whatever car it is that<br />
you have. "What do you have now? Would you buy another one?" People<br />
"Oh, yes. This is a great decision. I love this car." I'll tell you<br />
where you can find out, is you look at what percentage of people<br />
that did own that particular car did buy another one? They're<br />
always way lower than they those that say they would buy another<br />
one.<br />
<br />
And it gets more pronounced with higher prices. If you've made a decision<br />
to buy a high-priced car, you're going to think, "Man, I'll tell you what.<br />
This Land Rover was the best car I have ever bought." And 78 percent of<br />
people might say, "I'm going to buy another one." and you know what,<br />
about 15 percent of the people actually do.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So this gets back to the magazine because people want to justify in a<br />
review...<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. That's exactly right. And as Betsy said, it could go the<br />
other way, too. "I think I'm getting screwed here with this product<br />
and I'm going to knock it." So when you get reviews, in essence, over<br />
the transom, they're either justifying, "This was really wonderful.<br />
I made a great decision buying this particular product," or "I hate<br />
it." It's hard to know whether the review was really objective and<br />
realistic.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you ever push-back from advertisers?<br />
<br />
Betsy: All the time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Can you tell me?<br />
<br />
Betsy: We would feel the pushback from our ad sales people. They would say<br />
"So and so is annoyed with you because you didn't put it." We very<br />
rarely put anybody's totally negative reviews, but we tried to be<br />
objective, and not every product is perfect. Almost every product<br />
is going to have some negative feature.<br />
<br />
We would put those in and the advertisers would then go to their ad<br />
rep and complain. Then the ad rep would come to us and say, "Why<br />
are you doing this? These people are mad. I have to sell them ads."<br />
We would just say "Separation of church and State. You are<br />
advertising in this magazine because it's a credible magazine, and<br />
if we let you push us around, it won't be credible anymore, and<br />
then it will reflect on your ad."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you remember anyone ever pulling ads, you know...?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't, offhand. Do you?<br />
<br />
David: No, but I can tell you the opposite. There were a couple of<br />
magazines that almost ran manufactured press releases as product<br />
reviews. They did get more advertising than we did from some<br />
manufacturers that liked that. I hate to name names, but Compute<br />
magazine. I don't think you'll find any negative reviews in Compute<br />
magazine. Everything was the greatest thing since sliced bread.<br />
Personal Computing, similar, very positive "Wow, gee whiz" reviews on<br />
almost all the things that they saw. It just isn't that way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You have talked a lot about Creative and we've talked briefly<br />
at least about the other magazines. Sync, the one about Timex<br />
Sinclair. I understand the allure of publishing a magazine geared<br />
to a specific system, but why did you pick Timex Sinclair? [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Probably two reasons. One is that we had more of a presence in<br />
England than most of the other magazines.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Still do.<br />
<br />
David: We had a very early agreement with David Tebbet, who was the co-<br />
publisher of Personal Computer, something-or-other. It might have<br />
been Personal Computer World. Yes, it was.<br />
<br />
Betsy Ahi: Yes it was Personal Computer World, and when PC world started they<br />
had to call it PC World because there was already a Personal<br />
Computer World in England.<br />
<br />
David: And we had an agreement that they could reprint materials from<br />
Creative Computing, which they did for a while but then they<br />
developed their own in-house capabilities and there was enough<br />
differences. We went to England and very early on had an agent in<br />
England that we could take subscriptions.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A housewife who kept the back issues in her spare bathroom.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we still know her. Hazel Greaves, Hazy. Anyway, so we were<br />
getting enough subscriptions from England. We were sending over, I<br />
don't know how they packaged them up, but they call them Mbox, or M-<br />
bags, mail bags basically of magazines, then we remail them from<br />
England. So I had more of our connection with British market than<br />
probably any of the other magazines, well definitely did.<br />
<br />
And so I get to know Clive Sinclair and what's going on over there.<br />
And then when they bring over the computer to this country and<br />
Timex, I mean my God, big outfit. They were going to market it. By that<br />
time you know, there was no point starting a Commodore<br />
magazine or an entire magazine. They were, Or Apple, they were<br />
already existed. So maybe this is going to be the next big one. We<br />
will be right there when they start. When they were.<br />
<br />
Timex actually put, what we had simple, simple Sync or something<br />
but it was in the package with the computer. So that was one way of<br />
getting our subscriber base and we couldn't possibly afford to<br />
advertise and do direct mailings for a magazine like that. But they<br />
were, in a sense, helping us get going. So that's why. It was pretty<br />
successful actually. We were making money on that magazine<br />
mainly because we didn't have to promote it.<br />
<br />
If we had to get subscriptions, we could not have possibly made it<br />
work. There wasn't enough advertising really. I don't know what the<br />
ratio here was, but it was not as good as we would have liked it.<br />
The magazine would have been tiny if we maintained the same<br />
advertising to edit ratio we would have liked. But we didn't lose<br />
money on it but we didn't make anything on it either. I<br />
think it was a break-even proposition.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Microsystems. I'll say I don't think I know anything about it,<br />
but it was on the list.<br />
<br />
David: Microsystems... I said there was a lot of early development in<br />
New Jersey and there was a guy named Saul Libes, you will find him<br />
probably, [laughs] who was the first president of the Amateur<br />
Computer Group in New Jersey. He was a Professor at Trenton State<br />
College, and he felt that Byte magazine started out fine but then<br />
they were focusing more on assembled hardware and things that were<br />
already made.<br />
<br />
So he wanted to get down on really lower level of do it yourself,<br />
build it yourself. Microsystems was more like Byte was in the very<br />
beginning, publishing circuit diagram with logic in PC's and<br />
everything.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The first name was S-100 Microsystems.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, for the S-100 bus, then it became Microsystems in '78 or '79.<br />
When some of the others came out they started covering the 6800<br />
and 68000 chips from Motorola. But I would say it was a really<br />
techy magazine and it was one that I think, Ziff probably killed<br />
that one off.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was dead before before Ziff. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: It might have been. I don't know, but it was...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I mean, S-100 bus did not survive into the 80's.<br />
<br />
David: It was dead before as there was these eras and the do it yourself<br />
S100 era, that was '75 to '78. Then it kind of had a downward spiral<br />
of two or three years and it was gone. Well, maybe it wasn't gone<br />
but it wasn't the same. And so Microsystems was tuned into that and<br />
they were running hardcore stuff.<br />
<br />
And the reason that Saul... we reached an agreement with him to<br />
publish it, is basically he didn't have any real magazine<br />
background. We thought we could do something with it. It turned out<br />
not to be a good fit, but we published it for a while. I don't know<br />
if we made money or lost money on that. Probably it didn't make<br />
anything. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Small Business Computers, or Computing.<br />
<br />
David: What?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Small business computers? Who do we buy that from? I can't even<br />
remember. You can't even remember that we had it, I can tell by the<br />
look on your face.<br />
<br />
David: I can't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That one of my brother... my brother was the publisher remember?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I don't know who or where we got it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That just fold into Creative or...?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Eventually, but that we post it for a while. I think is something<br />
that somebody basically left on our door step.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think it was kind of like a puppy on the... [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: I think it came with your brother.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, because my brother wasn't doing publishing until after leaving<br />
college.<br />
<br />
David: It sounded like a good idea at the time, but...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think we saw a future in business computing.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we did, and unfortunately that was one Ziff Davis...<br />
I mentioned yesterday that they wanted to really shift the<br />
focus of Creative Computing away from home and broaden out and<br />
shifted into the small business market. And just did not, it was an<br />
uncomfortable fit. We would've been better to have a separate<br />
magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember where we got Small Business Computing from or<br />
where it went.<br />
<br />
David: I don't either.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But I know that obviously it wasn't a huge acquisition.<br />
<br />
David: It was a footnote.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A footnote in the story. [laughs]<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Actually, a bigger acquisition was earlier and that was ROM<br />
Magazine. ROM was published by who? (ED: not the Atari-related<br />
magazine of the early 1980s.)<br />
<br />
Betsy: Erik Sandberg-Diment.<br />
<br />
David: Right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: D-I-M-E-N-T.<br />
<br />
David: Connecticut. He did a nice job with the magazine, very nice job<br />
with it. Published nine issues and a little different focus than<br />
Creative but it really overlapped us very nicely. He had more<br />
graphic stuff and it was through him that I got to know<br />
George Baker and some of the people up there. The other guy that<br />
did the pixelated blocks photos. You've seen those.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The Einstein.<br />
<br />
David: [crosstalk] The Lincoln with block pics.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Block pics.<br />
<br />
David: Block pics. OK, he and George Baker sort of came as a package with<br />
ROM, they knew of each other. We actually, for I would say, four or<br />
five issues, ran ROM as a whole separate section and even set it on<br />
the cover of Creative Computing and ROM. And then it became evident...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think that was because he had a whole other editorial kicking<br />
around. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That we bought.<br />
<br />
David: Could be. And then we would just merge it in completely, but that<br />
was a very good fit. It brought us more editorial than it did<br />
subscribers. They did not have a big subscriber base. But it was a<br />
nice marriage in a sense.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Video and Arcade Games only published I think four issues.<br />
<br />
David: Three.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Three?<br />
<br />
David: Actually, three but if you've got a hold of the third one, you're<br />
doing well. I think Ziff cut that off after two real issues got<br />
mailed out. We did a third one but it wasn't sent out to<br />
subscribers.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My website only has two issues.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. There were only two that really were distributed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So now I have...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: A goal. [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, if you can get a hold of the third one. [laughter] I don't<br />
even have that. There's a same thing on Atarian. There were three<br />
issues of Atarian that I did not keep the third issue. Oh, man.<br />
Shoot me.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: But Video and Arcade Games, there were at least five or six other<br />
magazines focusing on that. Talk about magazines that were running<br />
non-objective manufacture-provided reviews, all the others were. I,<br />
maybe, convinced myself and some people at Ziff Davis that there was<br />
a need for really objective...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ziff? Did Ziff do that?<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Were we with Ziff when we did that?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah. That was a late one. So we said, let's...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Continue it through.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, that was definitely. Let's do it. But again...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not only that but it was going to be fun.<br />
<br />
David: It was going to be a lot of fun. [laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: So why did it fail?<br />
<br />
David: OK, again you got to look at the eras and what was happening.<br />
Arcade games then really were on the decline. Video arcades where<br />
you go in and pop a quarter in, because there was so much more<br />
capability in the home computers and the Coleco and the Mattel<br />
and the different home systems. They could do all, well,<br />
not as much, but you get a pretty darned good game that you could<br />
take home with you and not have to pop a quarter in the slot every<br />
time you play.<br />
<br />
So arcade games were kind of on the downward spiral, so that<br />
eliminated a lot of potential advertising. We weren't going to get<br />
any advertising from Namco and all of the producers of the arcade<br />
games, which was, "Hey, it is advertising along with..." And the<br />
other home producers of the games, there were four or five magazines<br />
already that they were pouring money into. They didn't really want<br />
another one.<br />
<br />
So it was advertising that or just lack of advertising that killed<br />
that off. We just couldn't get it. I think there was still a need<br />
for what we had sort of in a sense proposed to do of objectively<br />
reviewing games and secondly, we're telling people how to play<br />
them.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, it was strategies.<br />
<br />
David: Strategies. It was advertising that we just didn't have, couldn't<br />
get.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Ok, the others I have are Atari Explorer and Atarian, I think we've<br />
covered pretty well.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Military vehicles, which we talked about.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] Yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So the other magazines, Byte and Kilobaud, was it rivalry?<br />
Was it friendly competition?<br />
<br />
David: Byte, we were in bed together. Not in bed together, but we<br />
published the best of Byte. Creative Computing did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: For awhile.<br />
<br />
David: Well, just one.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. That wasn't that friendly a rivalry. It wasn't that friendly<br />
after awhile.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't friendly once they sold to McGraw Hill, and they sold<br />
early. Then everything was off. We did some joint promotions with<br />
Byte for hardware creative software. We ran the ads for each other<br />
for a short time.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's when McGraw Hill cutoff.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] In a heartbeat. No more of that.<br />
<br />
David: We felt that basically we weren't even competing for the same<br />
advertisers. Just a few, but not really. Certainly, we were not in<br />
direct competition at all with Byte. So that was just kind of all<br />
in the same place and you're going in a hardware direction, we're<br />
going on the software.<br />
<br />
When Wayne Green threw this intrigue with his wife and everything<br />
else, lost Byte Magazine. He was fit to be tied. "I'm going to kill<br />
them!" and he started Kilobyte. It wasn't killable. It was Kilobyte<br />
for I don't know how many issues.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not many.<br />
<br />
David: 1000 bytes. [laughter] and a kilobyte, it had a dual meaning there.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: That was a ferocious and very nasty. Oh, horrible rivalry. Somebody<br />
early on forced him not to use the name byte at all.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm sure it was Byte.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: So they changed it to Kilobaud.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Which didn't mean anything.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: No.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So did you have a relationship with Wayne?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Nobody had a relationship with... [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Nobody really had a relationship. I knew him, of course. He was<br />
going his own way. Now the one area actually where we got into more<br />
competition with him than in the magazine itself, because again, he<br />
was trying to be like Byte, hardware oriented and he published 73<br />
Magazine so he was basically focusing on the ham radio people, the<br />
do it yourselfers and so on. But they started a software division.<br />
It was pretty good. They had a lot of the same types of software<br />
that we did on cassette tape.<br />
<br />
In any event, we really had more of a head to head rivalry on the<br />
software than in the magazine publishing. We never really had<br />
anything to do with the magazine products or books. They also<br />
published some books but more like the magazine hardware type of<br />
thing. We weren't quite as selective, but our book publishing we<br />
did get into things that weren't in the magazine. We published<br />
books with more of a hardware orientation. We had a little broader<br />
line of books than the type of things that we had in the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I don't know if you want to open this can of worms, but you said to<br />
me in an email, "You couldn't find two people whose vision,<br />
philosophy, ethics, and view of business and life was further apart<br />
than Wayne and I." Can you elaborate on that? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was just basically unpleasant, is my take on him. I didn't know<br />
him that well but it was just sort of like he had a chip on his<br />
shoulder and was daring you to knock it off. Wouldn't you say?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You knew him before I did but by the time I arrived on the scene<br />
that was just sort of the general industry perception of him, I<br />
think. It was just stay away from him, leave him alone, he's not<br />
very nice.<br />
<br />
David: Well, one other thing, which we sort of touched on a couple of<br />
times, I'm very trusting. [laughter] Overly so, according to my ex-<br />
wife and I think there would be a couple of examples. Wayne would<br />
walk out of that door, boy, out of sight, 'you're going to do<br />
something to screw him' is what his view would be. He did not trust<br />
anybody.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] And least of all, his ex wife.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: It's the old saying, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean<br />
that somebody isn't out to get you." He thought everyone was out to<br />
get him, everybody. So we were totally philosophically different.<br />
Our ways of doing business were different. I shake hands with you,<br />
we have an agreement. You don't shake hands with Wayne.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't think his employees were ever happy either.<br />
<br />
David: Oh!<br />
<br />
Betsy: You talked to them and it shows. He didn't have like a great...<br />
<br />
David: Rapport.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well it was not. The culture of his organization I don't think was<br />
particularly, I think it was probably permeated with this lack of<br />
trust.<br />
<br />
David: Well, one thing, we had fun. We really did have fun at Creative<br />
Computing. Perhaps some of the editorial staff, too much. There was<br />
one point where Betsy had to away their...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well they were all young guys. Some of them even still in high<br />
school, they would play games for hours and hours and hours, long<br />
after the reviews were done. There was one, self-contained thing that<br />
played football, and, man, they played it for hours. I had to take it<br />
away from them. Like "don't make me be your mother".<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there any drug culture at all? If you read stories of Atari, if you<br />
were a programmer at Atari you used cocaine and pot everyday...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not that we knew of. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: The East coast was quite different than the west coast.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No there was nothing, really. I don't think so. In fact, my client<br />
John Anderson and Peter Fee, they were actually kind of protective<br />
of me in a lot of ways. I can remember being in John's office and<br />
they were talking about a movie or something like that. John said,<br />
"No, you wouldn't like this movie, don't go to this movie." That<br />
kind of thing, they were funny guys. They just kept laughing. David<br />
Lubar. They were free spirits but they were very funny, talented<br />
guys.<br />
<br />
David: He is coming out with a line of children's books, weird, weird<br />
stuff. The last one, something about the lawn mower weenies. He has<br />
a line of 6 or 8, and they're all little short stories. Some of<br />
them were adaptations of stuff that almost got published in<br />
Creative Computing, probably some of them did. Lubar is a funny<br />
guy.<br />
<br />
When he left and went to work for one of the video gaming<br />
companies, his first big successful game was "Worm Wars." You were<br />
like, "Worm Wars?" [laughs] Other people are fighting real serious<br />
warriors and you are fighting with worms.<br />
<br />
We just had a different kind of culture, it was just a lot of fun.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Jonny Anderson went to work for A+ in San Francisco. He was one<br />
of the five people killed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1986.<br />
He was in a car and a piece of the building fell on the car. He was<br />
a really funny guy.<br />
<br />
David: We did not have a serious business culture.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, we had this great big room with a bunch of tables set up around<br />
the edges, in the middle. It was kind of like that, nowhere near as<br />
neat.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I will clean that up for you.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] Just tangles of wires, and we had to have one of every<br />
kind of computer so we can test all the software, and this one<br />
would be running this kind of peripheral, and it was like a young<br />
guys dream job.<br />
<br />
David: You commented yesterday about how we had a bunch of high school,<br />
not quite, but still...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I said that they were in their early 20s but they basically had the<br />
maturity of high school students, they needed a little bit of<br />
mothering. But I wasn't that myself. They were just really nice<br />
guys, we did a good job hiring those kids.<br />
<br />
David: When you talk about the Atari cultures and some of the others,<br />
where every Friday some of these companies have parties, that kind<br />
of thing. We had an annual party, a picnic. We didn't need weekly<br />
parties and stuff to let you have fun because that stuff was going<br />
on every day, not really partying but playing the games and<br />
bantering and everything else.<br />
<br />
As they say, it wasn't a real efficient business culture.<br />
Heck, I had worked for Digital Equipment, which was still a pretty<br />
relaxed place, but AT&T which was anything but. This was as far away<br />
from that kind of corporate culture as you can get. But it worked.<br />
Didn't make a lot of money, but it worked.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah... [inaudible 01:26:58]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. And I think they appreciated it because they weren't making<br />
tons of money either, but they had a lot of fun. They<br />
enjoyed going to work, they really enjoyed it.<br />
<br />
[section in wrong place?]<br />
Kevin: Speaking of Kindle, I've done it but haven't told anybody yet that<br />
best of Creative Computing too is now available on Kindle. And I<br />
have been working backwards. [crosstalk] I just had it on sale.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I haven't publicized it yet for sale.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They won't let you do. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah, I think they will have two.<br />
<br />
David: Did you do that through Amazon? How do you convert is to Kindle?<br />
I scan them and then I do CRM and I use Elance or utilize some<br />
service in India that converts it back to ASCII, and then they<br />
convert it into an E-book from there. It's a lot of work, I want it<br />
done well, and I want it to be super awesome. And they just<br />
[inaudible 01:28:40] , like we were talking about before.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Outsourcing and stuff. But I can do it myself but that would take<br />
way too long. So I just try to do the quality control [inaudible<br />
01:28:49] . It's not perfect but better than nothing.<br />
<br />
David: I have reached the point where with my Dodge restoration book, that<br />
yes, many of the borders around the pictures are terrible, they're<br />
hand drawn and so on. But I'm not going to bother to re-do that, I<br />
just want take the book, get it into some sort of machine readable<br />
format, PDF or something. [inaudible 01:29:24] somebody that can...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah, I can get you off with that. We can then figure it out.<br />
<br />
David: I found one extra one that I can cut up.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That will help a lot. [inaudible 01:29:37] . If you want to sell a<br />
PDF of it, that would be up in couple of day. That's easy, but a<br />
searchable Kindle version that takes longer.<br />
<br />
David: I don't want a Kindle version because people want to print out<br />
something that they can...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Take out to the garage<br />
<br />
David: When people slide under the vehicle they have it there, "Oh, OK<br />
this is what I should be looking for."<br />
<br />
Kevin: If you scan it and upload it to Amazon, even create space from<br />
[inaudible 01:30:06] company, then there could actually be another<br />
book, that looks pretty identical to the first one. We will figure<br />
out.<br />
[back to original recording] <br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you read any computer magazines now? Not even read, but are you familiar with...?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Are there any?<br />
<br />
Kevin: There are but they are very different than Creative.<br />
<br />
David: Somebody out there said, "What did you read today?" The only<br />
magazines that I will occasionally pick up in the computer field<br />
are mostly from England, Internet magazines, well there are<br />
several, which is sort of interesting that the dominant Internet<br />
magazines come from England, but they do.<br />
<br />
If I want to do something, and I haven't lately, but I wanted to<br />
get into doing something different or interactive or something with<br />
my website. I'd pick up one of those magazines and kind of have<br />
same kind of thing that Creative used to publish. Here is a code to<br />
do it in Pearl or HTML, whatever.<br />
<br />
I converted all of my website, some time ago, quite a while ago now,<br />
to XHTML from old HTML. I did not like any of the programs that generate<br />
web pages, mainly because... Well, today its probably OK, but I felt that<br />
earlier on, they were very inefficient. You'd have this much code<br />
for something and XHTML would write it in five lines.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah, using Dreamweaver or something, it was terrible. [crosstalk] <br />
<br />
David: My old-fashioned [inaudible 01:32:23] the<br />
interpreter or compiler or whatever, has to go through all of<br />
that just to pick out what is going to be displayed." My web pages<br />
are very compact and short. They are all XHTML, none of this<br />
extra garbage and style pages and everything else.<br />
<br />
Anyway, so that's what I'll pick up a magazine for. I'm was doing a<br />
little bit of programming in Pearl and then I said, "No. You know<br />
what, I can get routines that I can download and I don't have to<br />
learn it myself." I learned enough to know that I don't want your<br />
Pearl programmer. [laughs] Or what is the other one? I don't know.<br />
I'm right at the point now where I'm wanting to do some more things<br />
that I can't, so I'll probably purchase some more computer<br />
magazines and learn about it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Has anyone talked to you about the purchase of PC by Davis?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is a big story.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: She was involved.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was involved. There was a magazine called PC. I was in San<br />
Francisco.<br />
<br />
Kevin: PC Magazine?<br />
<br />
Betsy: PC Magazine, right. And, there was a guy named Tony Gold and there<br />
was somebody else that I can't remember. There was Tony Gold and<br />
this Mr. X started this magazine and they hired... David Banell will<br />
probably tell the real story, I don't know all the details but I'm sure<br />
he has it engraved in his brain.<br />
<br />
They hired David Banell to run it and I guess several other people,<br />
and my understanding is, that they told them they were going to<br />
give them a piece of the action, they weren't going to pay them<br />
very much but you're all part owners and everything, but nobody<br />
ever wrote it down.<br />
<br />
So when Ziff Davis approached Tony Gold and Mr. X and wanted to buy<br />
the magazine, and the guys said, "Oh yeah, sure," and they sold it<br />
to him and all these people that were working for them said, "Well,<br />
what about us. We're part owners too." But there was no proof of<br />
it. So Ziff bought it, and they were right in the middle, just<br />
about to go to press with an issue and they got word that it had<br />
been purchased by Ziff.<br />
<br />
So David Banell took just about the entire staff and they walked<br />
out and went across town and started PC World. Apparently their<br />
lawyers said, "Don't take anything with you." So they just walked<br />
out and left the offices as they were, And Ziff, who now had a<br />
magazine to get out and no one to do it, sent me out to San<br />
Francisco for a couple of weeks and there was like an editorial<br />
assistant and a couple of freelance writers, were the only people<br />
left. So I had to figure out...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So this is when you became the interim.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is how I become the editorial director of PC. So I basically<br />
went out there and walked into this office and had to pull together<br />
their issue and get it off to the printer. They had a big dummy on<br />
the wall where everything...<br />
<br />
Kevin: They lay all the pages...<br />
<br />
Betsy: The lay out of all the positions where all the pages and the stories<br />
were going to go and they moved everything around. [laughs] But<br />
they couldn't resist.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That is awesome.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This one guy, whose name I wish I could remember. Barry Owen,<br />
worked with me, and we were able to get it off to the printer and<br />
then pack everything up and send it back to New York and then they<br />
hired Barry Owen, he moved to New York and he eventually become the<br />
editor, because that was who they had.<br />
<br />
I was sort of the editorial director for a while and they said<br />
that, "If you were going to do this, you would have to come to the<br />
city. We are going to really set up an office here and make it<br />
real." And I said, "Nah, I am not going to drive into the city every<br />
day or take the train or the bus or anything." It was a interesting<br />
story and we were getting much more interesting version of it from<br />
David Bunnell, who was there. [laughs]<br />
<br />
And in the mean time, they were all starting up PC World and taking<br />
all of their freelancers and trying to make it as difficult as<br />
possible for PC. That was a big rivalry, obviously.<br />
<br />
David: And then it created a couple of months of problems at Creative too,<br />
because my editor was gone. I had really gotten very dependent to<br />
rely on her for so many things. "I got to edit this myself?" And<br />
then the whole question mark was, OK if PC Magazine, is Betsy goint<br />
to stay with it? It was a time of uncertainty.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm sure it was a bad career move.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. But PC Magazine still exists and Creative Computing doesn't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, exactly. But I don't know if I would have existed if I had to<br />
commute to New York, that's a nasty commute. Millions of people do<br />
it but, I just didn't want to be one of them. I didn't mean to<br />
interrupt, so back to your...<br />
<br />
Kevin: What are you most proud of, of everything you've done? What's the<br />
thing you want on your tombstone?<br />
<br />
David: OK, that's obviously not a one word answer. Proud isn't... I am not<br />
crazy about it. I guess the fact that I continued to hear from<br />
people that said, "Hey, I got my start in computing from Basic<br />
Computer Games" or Creative Computing, or something that I had my<br />
hand in, that makes me feel pretty good.<br />
<br />
You have a long term, or longer term influence than just what you<br />
do at the time, it's living on. It's no going to live on forever. Basic<br />
isn't going to live on forever. But I think the idea that having<br />
some positive influence on other people, on their lives, on their<br />
careers, that's a good.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You helped send people into the computer sciences field.<br />
<br />
David: And you know the specific individual accomplishments. Yeah, I wrote<br />
a couple of programs that are probably in some cases, maybe not the<br />
program but the routines, are still in use. That's minor compared<br />
to having an influence on people and their career and their<br />
outlook, and their future. That's way more important. "OK so I wrote a<br />
great scheduling algorithm, so what."<br />
<br />
Kevin: And you really think it's the same algorithm that's being used in<br />
Google maps and...<br />
<br />
David: Portions of it, yeah. But that is minor. I look back and I say,<br />
"Almost anything that I wrote in the last 30-40 years, if I were<br />
doing it today, I would have done it a little differently, but I<br />
didn't know then what I know now." So there's no one thing I could<br />
say, "Oh, that was a really great article, or great insight," or<br />
something. Anything can be improved upon.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sure. That's what disappoints me about computer magazines today is<br />
I don't think that it seems like children going to be able to go.<br />
It's not going to motivate anybody to do anything, other than use<br />
Word version 18 or whatever. There's no Basic programs to type<br />
anymore and it's not exciting.<br />
[cross talk]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Well, you know, Lee Felsenstein was mentioning that at breakfast,<br />
oh gosh, that was just yesterday.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was yesterday. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] That kids today don't have any feeling about, or I should<br />
say knowledge about the real basics of bits. What is a bit?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: Nobody knows anymore. He wanted to find some little simple piece of<br />
hardware. Really, I guess he has, that every kid when they're in<br />
the 5th or 6th grade will be exposed to this so they'll have some<br />
concept of what bits are all about. Are you ever going to get that<br />
into schools today? No. So anyway, it's just kind of, hopefully<br />
there's been some long term influence.<br />
<br />
And what I'm doing now even, which is mainly developing bible<br />
studies for... well, I mostly have guys that have had a drug or<br />
alcohol addiction problem coming to this. They're in a rescue<br />
mission. I'm hoping that these studies can have a little bit of an<br />
influence on the direction of their lives. They're a positive<br />
influence on where they go from here. So it's kind of, people more<br />
than a specific thing or whatever.<br />
<br />
[pause]<br />
<br />
[not in recording]<br />
Those are terrible copies.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They are copies. These are from the scans. I was printing scans and<br />
I wasn't trying to make them pretty. Just for my reasons, it was<br />
quick and dirty. I could've bumped the contrast and stuff.<br />
<br />
David: There's Carl.<br />
[pause]<br />
<br />
[back to recording]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do have anything left, like how many subscribers you had over time?<br />
Is that data around anymore? Or how many newsstand copies you had? I<br />
assume that is a lot.<br />
<br />
David: OK, maximum, I think we mentioned that. We hit just about a half a<br />
million before Ziff killed it. Then, they gave people a choice of<br />
three magazines that they expected to continue to publish, PC,<br />
Apple's A+, or Mac User.<br />
<br />
I'm guessing that most people went with PC. One of the reasons<br />
actually was Ziff's rationale at that point was, PC World had<br />
really grown a lot and the circulation base of PC World and PC were<br />
very close. They were both about a half million. PC might have had<br />
a small lead.<br />
<br />
Then, by killing Creative Computing and rolling all of those<br />
subscribers, there was some overlap. Certainly, there were some<br />
subscribers that got both magazines. You probably had a quarter of<br />
a million additional subscribers into PC. All of the sudden, they<br />
go to advertise, "We've got three-quarters of a million and PC<br />
World only has half a million."<br />
<br />
That was when PC had a huge growth spurt. You know, they started<br />
publishing those telephone-book-thick issues.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I would think that it probably still holds the record for the<br />
largest magazine ever published, whenever the issue was that they<br />
published it, it was their biggest one. Certainly magazines aren't<br />
getting bigger now. They didn't continue to increase in size after<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: Then they started publishing it twice a month. The nudge that the<br />
subscriber base at Creative gave to PC really separated them<br />
completely from PC World. So they had their reasons.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. This is a chart of the page count of Creative Computing over<br />
its life. It's not a question, I just made a chart. Every December<br />
there's a peak for the big December issue. Right at the end it<br />
just, all of the sudden, stopped.<br />
<br />
David: Well, that's when Ziff had decided to kill it, which was almost a<br />
year before. They basically let us publish for another eight or<br />
nine months after they had made the decision.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was a lot of back and forth. Are they going to kill it? Are<br />
they not going to kill it?<br />
<br />
David: They weren't promoting, no subscription promotion. They were saving<br />
their money.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sure.<br />
<br />
David: If you don't promote the subscriptions, you're not going to get them.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is page count.<br />
<br />
David: It was advertising.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:48:59]<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't actually subscriber base didn't drop them. That's cool.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just thought I'd do a comparison, even though that's not really<br />
what I'm doing here.<br />
<br />
In the beginning, you guys were bimonthly and they [Kilobyte] were<br />
monthly. I couldn't know how to do it accurately. Their<br />
page count's actually higher, because they were doing twice as<br />
much. I don't have all the data here. You guys tended to publish<br />
larger issues than "Kilobyte?"<br />
<br />
David: It was so dependent upon advertising. You got some magazines, they<br />
would run 80, 90 percent advertising, if they could. In some<br />
special interest fields, you can get away with that, because people<br />
are actually buying the magazine for the advertising, not for the<br />
editorial content.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Computer Shopper, yeah, a good example.<br />
<br />
David: That's exactly right. Even the guys that bought Military<br />
Vehicles, they just went over so heavily to... I always believe that<br />
you should have at least one-third editorial content, preferably<br />
more. They dropped down to 20 percent to edit.<br />
<br />
Kevin: There was one issue, the 10th anniversary issue, I don't mean to be<br />
picking on Wayne here. There was this quote he happened to say,<br />
which I thought was really interesting to me, I wanted to get your<br />
take on it. He said, this is in 1984, "A computer system doesn't<br />
really stand a prayer anymore unless there's at least one<br />
dedicated, independent magazine for its users."<br />
<br />
David: Wayne said that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wayne said that. Is that true? At the time, would you have agreed<br />
with that?<br />
<br />
David: In '84? Again, you've got to look at where we were in the cycle at<br />
that point. The cycle was then, there were more computers dying off<br />
than there were new ones being released. Standardization had come<br />
in really. You've got the IBM PC, and everybody's producing a PC<br />
clone. Apple kept going, and Atari, and Commodore attempted to.<br />
But yeah, if you were to start a computer company at that point,<br />
with a new computer, yeah, you'd need something to give your user<br />
base something to do with it, more than just what the manufacturer<br />
was selling. So, that's probably accurate. What do you think?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, I think it's accurate. That's what people started to expect.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. Another quote in the same issue which we've kind of touched<br />
on from Tom Dwyer, this is in 1984, he's saying, "Computer<br />
magazines used to have personality [laughter] and now they don't."<br />
Now, they really don't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They really don't!<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think they still have personality in form but now it's just<br />
inconsistent.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Who was Tom Dwyer? I don't remember him.<br />
<br />
David: Tom Dwyer? He was at University of Pittsburgh. He came up with all<br />
those neat applications. He and Margo... He had the best BASIC<br />
primer of anybody, in fact the only one that both Kemeny and Kurtz<br />
endorsed outside of their own material. He had really written some<br />
good BASIC books.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm just finishing up here. The Internet says you were born in<br />
1939. Is that right?<br />
<br />
David: Yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Where were you born?<br />
<br />
David: New York, New York.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent.<br />
<br />
David: I was born in the hospital that my father had a hand in designing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Really?<br />
<br />
David: He was an architect up until the Recession. I think he, perhaps,<br />
designed the restrooms but he wasn't the...<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: When were you two married?<br />
<br />
Betsy: 1988. 25 years ago.<br />
<br />
David: June 18, 1988.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What's your last name now?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mine?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ahl.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I tried keeping this professional thing and it was just way too<br />
confusing, since that really wasn't my name anyway. That was my<br />
first husband's name, and then just... "this is way too complicated."<br />
<br />
Kevin: My wife kept her maiden name and now she wishes she hadn't. It's<br />
just confusing. It just made sense to do.<br />
<br />
Betsy: If had been my maiden name, I might have, but it really wasn't.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What haven't I asked you that I should have?<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] We kind of were noodling it around last night and said,<br />
"Man, the guy's thorough."<br />
<br />
Betsy: You the most prepared interviewer ever.<br />
<br />
[not in recording]<br />
David: I jotted down a couple of notes. Nope.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Got everything?<br />
[back to recording]<br />
<br />
David: What's your thinking? Because originally you were talking to me<br />
about covering Wayne's magazines and so on.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My original thought, when I had put no thought into it, was that it<br />
would be half about Wayne's magazine and half about Creative. First<br />
of all, after talking to him, I thought there's not enough to do<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: Did you talk to Wayne?<br />
<br />
Kevin: I talked to Wayne.<br />
<br />
David: Well that's good to know, right? Carl Helmers didn't know if Wayne<br />
was still alive.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He's still alive.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's true. We asked Carl Helmers if Wayne was still alive and he<br />
was "huh, dunno".<br />
<br />
David: Actually, there was another guy up there that published a computer<br />
magazine. What the heck was the name of it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Who are you talking about?<br />
<br />
David: Up in New Hampshire, Peterborough. It was one of the earlier would-<br />
be competitors to Datamation. So, it was much earlier.<br />
<br />
He was absolutely totally convinced about the Kennedy assassination<br />
and published a computer analysis of all the photos and everything<br />
else. Every single issue of the magazine had this stuff. He and<br />
Wayne were on the same wavelength on that. You ask Wayne about the<br />
conspiracy. [laughs] You'll get an earful.<br />
<br />
Kevin: In answer to your question. First, it was going to be the two, and<br />
then that happened. Also my wife said, "If you're doing two, then<br />
it's going to seem like a compare and contrast thing." That's not<br />
what I want to do.<br />
<br />
Now I'm thinking that this will be a project about the earliest<br />
computer magazines, the first computer magazines. That way, I can,<br />
whatever, four or five chapters. One on Kilobaud, one on Creative,<br />
and maybe Byte I'm meeting with the editor of Byte in a couple of<br />
weeks at an event, maybe Interface Age or one of the other ones.<br />
<br />
David: If you can find Bob Jones, that would be an interesting contrast.<br />
He was Interface Age. He had a different perspective on a lot of<br />
things, and I had a lot of respect for him. He just didn't sell at<br />
the right time. Too bad. Bob Jones was a very serious, good guy.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Who were the other early people? Dr. Dobbs? I don't know what...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, Dr. Dobbs...<br />
<br />
David: Oh Jim Warren! Oh my goodness. That would give you another perspective<br />
altogether.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's, again, the California...<br />
<br />
David: Jim Warren and Bob Albrecht are tied together very closely. They're<br />
both in sort of in the alternative lifestyle. I don't know what<br />
you'd call it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That probably had Friday afternoon pot parties. [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Oh, boy. Did they ever! Yes, yes. Jim also was the one that started<br />
the West Coast Computer Fairs. He's a very capable guy. Dr. Dobb's<br />
journal was in a sense, well, you've probably seen it. You have,<br />
right? OK, so you know.<br />
<br />
That's really low level programming rather than higher languages.<br />
We're talking about machine languages, assembly language,<br />
programming, and there.<br />
<br />
It was sort of like Microsystems was to Byte. Microsystems, for the<br />
really serious hardware guy. Dr. Dobbs was for the really serious<br />
programmer, compared to Creative which was for people who just wanted<br />
to type something in that would work.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Lets play [inaudible 01:59:35] in BASIC, right. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Dr. Dobbs. That was sort of like a totally different... it wasn't a<br />
competitor.<br />
<br />
David: We didn't compete at all. I had a view that we competed at all with<br />
them; they may have thought we did but I didn't think so.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did they even have advertising?<br />
<br />
David: Oh yeah, actually they did, and it kept going for a long time<br />
because it was a small little niche magazine. But, yeah, Jim Warren<br />
would be an interesting guy, very interesting guy, early on. I don't<br />
know about Albrecht because you say he published more tabloid<br />
newspapers. I don't know if they ever really published any magazine<br />
size thing or not. Probably not, but it would give me a totally<br />
different perspective because they're coming from the west coast,<br />
looser, or whatever.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That sounded pretty loose.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah nothing compared to that.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think he was sort of in rebellion when he started working full time<br />
at Creative Computing because he was coming off of AT&T where he had<br />
to wear a suit to work every day. So the first thing he did was burn<br />
his suits and wear t-shirt and jeans way before anybody was doing<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: I went extremely in the other direction, yeah I did, but who else<br />
real early. Personal Computing, which I think David Barnell somehow<br />
involved in it at some point in there. Because they moved from the<br />
west coast to New Jersey, and they were bought by... who was that? It<br />
was mostly a company that published things like hardware age and<br />
advertiser-driven magazines. What was the name?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, gosh. Begins with an 'H'.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Halshep?<br />
<br />
David: No. Anyway, when they brought Personal Computing... I think Barnell<br />
maybe even started it, and then they moved it to New Jersey, and<br />
then David said "I'm not going to New Jersey. I'm a west coast<br />
guy," or whatever. And then, they changed the whole thing totally.<br />
That's why I said they're one of the ones where they were so<br />
totally advertiser driven. A press release is a product review, as<br />
far as they were concerned.<br />
<br />
They had some interesting stuff. They were a competitor only in<br />
name, but also because they got the advertising. "I think I'm going<br />
to advertise"... "Oh! We're going to publish a wonderful review! Give<br />
it to us." And so they were early, and they made money.<br />
<br />
There were a bunch of flash-in-the-pan magazines that lasted 2 or 3<br />
or maybe 6 ssues, but nobody...<br />
<br />
Kevin: But only one in seven made it, so...<br />
<br />
Betsy: One in seven, right?<br />
<br />
David: That's right, exactly. I can't remember the name of some of these<br />
ones, but there was a very successful big magazine that published<br />
all Apple... reviews of Apple stuff. What was that one? Apple by<br />
themselves spawned I'd guess half a dozen magazines.<br />
<br />
Kevin: There was A+, and Insider, and Apple... a bunch of others.<br />
<br />
David: Right. Actually, there's one that I can't think of the name of, it<br />
turned out, it was bigger and thicker and creative. They were<br />
publishing a lot of stuff, but again, it would all be positive and<br />
so they really killed us on getting advertising. We had been a leading<br />
publisher of Apple material for a while. Then all these others came<br />
along. That one, whatever it was, was really took a lot of<br />
advertising from us. I'll think about it.<br />
<br />
[not in recording]<br />
Kevin: You'll remember.<br />
<br />
David: I'll remember some of this.<br />
[back to recording]<br />
<br />
David: When it all settled out, you came back down to eight or nine,<br />
but the ones we're talking about...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Well, at one point there was 200.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I think that's correct.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You are probably counting newsletters..<br />
<br />
Kevin: Probably industry-specific stuff and niche stuff but still, you<br />
went from one to 200, 10 years ago.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. That's true.</div>Mauryhttps://www.computingpioneers.com/index.php?title=Dave_Ahl_and_Betsy_Ahl&diff=182Dave Ahl and Betsy Ahl2021-08-19T19:45:10Z<p>Maury: fixing inaudible sections</p>
<hr />
<div>This is a transcript of an audio interview. This transcript may contain errors - if you're using this material for research, etc. please verify with the original recorded interview.<br />
<br />
Source: ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast<br />
<br />
Source URL: http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-280-david-and-betsy-ahl-creative-computing-magazine<br />
<br />
Interviewer: Kevin Savetz<br />
<br />
Date: 3/4 April 2013<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm interested in how you guys got together. Was it some sort of<br />
office romance? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It started before then. I was working at Drew University and I was<br />
dating the computer science professor. He invited Dave...he was a<br />
subscriber to Creative Computing. I can remember being at his house<br />
and picking up a copy of this magazine and thinking, "Creative<br />
Computing," and laughing. "What kind of a title is that?"<br />
He invited Dave to come speak to one of his classes. While he was<br />
there, he said, "I should stop by your placement office. We're<br />
starting to expand. I'm looking for some people." Right? Am I<br />
getting this right? I was looking for other opportunities, so I<br />
sent him my resume. Many months later, he hired me.<br />
<br />
David: She still smarts about that.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: I interviewed her in, I don't know, April or so.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You interviewed me on April 17th and you did not hire me until<br />
August 1st. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: A lot was going on that year. That was '78.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was a really long time after that that we got married. We didn't<br />
get married until 10 years later.<br />
<br />
David: Actually, I had hired Betsy as our business manager. That's what I<br />
really needed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Not a wife, then.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not wife then, either.<br />
<br />
David: Not at that point. We had 2 buildings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had one.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, well I was looking for...<br />
<br />
Betsy: My first job was to find another building.<br />
<br />
David: We were expanding like crazy. In fact, one of the reasons that I<br />
didn't hire her sooner, I had just left my day job at AT&T, and was<br />
facing up to, "Oh my gosh, can I afford to take a salary out of<br />
Creative Computing?" Yes, we had expanded a lot, but can I even pay<br />
myself, much less other senior people? I left AT&T in July, and<br />
finally by August it became clear I really have to get this<br />
administration end of things under control.<br />
The editorial was OK. I had enough outside contributors that were<br />
going along with what we were doing in-house that I could continue<br />
with that, but it was the other end of things where we really had<br />
some problems. So then we go to 2 separate facilities. One was a 2<br />
family house on the other side of Morristown, and the other was a<br />
converted greenhouse garage, which is where I started. So, Betsy<br />
was in the greenhouse garage where I had the administration side of<br />
things, and I was at the house and that was the editorial and art<br />
and...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Software.<br />
<br />
David: ...putting the magazine together. Software, right. So she would<br />
come over from her place to my office every day or two just to let<br />
me know what's going on, and we'd get together. But it wasn't until<br />
I don't' remember the date when Betsy was saying, "Well, I'd like<br />
to get into..."<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well I had spent all my summers in college and two thereafter<br />
working at our local newspaper, writing editing and putting the<br />
whole thing together, so I think I more or less just said, "We've<br />
got all these new product announcements that we don't have anybody<br />
to do, why don't I just do them?" So, I started out doing the press<br />
releases and things.<br />
<br />
David: Her newspaper experience was first in high school covering sports.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, I started out covering the unpopular sports as a senior in<br />
high school. Because they didn't want a girl to write about the<br />
important sports. So they let the girl write about the unimportant<br />
sports, which turned out to be the winning sports, at this small<br />
New Jersey high school. That's how I started.<br />
<br />
David: And then at the newspaper, you started by writing obituaries,<br />
right?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well, it's one of the things I did. I always wanted to be a Spanish<br />
teacher. I didn't know anything about this. So, I got this sports-<br />
writing job by way of a babysitting job, I babysat for the<br />
publisher's kids and on the way home one night he said to me, "We<br />
always have a boy from the school who writes about the sports for<br />
the paper, do you know anybody?" and I said, "Well, I know the guy<br />
who did it last year, and if he could do it, I could do it."<br />
So I did that and didn't' think much more of it. Went off to<br />
college, came back over spring break, and ran into the guy in the<br />
grocery store and he said, "Would you like a job working for the<br />
paper this summer?" And I said sure. I had no idea whether he<br />
wanted me to sweep the floors or what, but it was a job so I took<br />
it. It was in the editorial department.<br />
<br />
And I learned from some very serious journalists who had worked for<br />
a very good paper, the Newark Evening News, which was a very<br />
serious paper that probably was too serious and folded, probably in<br />
the mid '60s, but these people were really good journalists and<br />
they taught me a lot.<br />
<br />
I think it was that first year, about halfway through the summer<br />
the publisher was on vacation, the editor was going to go on<br />
vacation when the publisher came back and the publisher, the day he<br />
was supposed to come back had appendicitis, had to have an<br />
appendectomy which back in those days was a much bigger deal than<br />
it is now. The editor said, "Well, I'm leaving." [laughs] And there<br />
I was. I was running this little paper.<br />
<br />
David: So I figured if you can run a newspaper, even though it's just a<br />
summer job, she could do a lot for us. Well, Betsy continued to<br />
handle the administrative things for really quite awhile and, as<br />
she said, probably was initially doing new product releases. Cause<br />
you get just tons of it over the transom and from these smaller<br />
companies...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So you'd like get a press release and then you'd rewrite it, that<br />
sort of things?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well we had a new product section and it was a format, a style for<br />
them, for each one. If they sent a photo, do a photo, a cut line<br />
for it. Basically what I do is let them pile up and then sort<br />
through and figure out which ones were worthy of attention. And<br />
then it was kind of just filler. They ran in one column and when<br />
you came to the end of the magazine whatever you had leftover you<br />
would fill in with these.<br />
<br />
David: And the thing is that the companies that were putting out these<br />
press releases, this was back in the, what '76, '77 or so, tiny<br />
little companies. They had no marketing expertise so they were<br />
sending us, in some cases, not quite handwritten but pretty crude.<br />
So it took some editing and some real work to make them readable.<br />
And then, as Betsy said, you had to guess. OK, which one, this is a<br />
significant product but is this guy going to be able to make this<br />
company go or is it just going to flop? And we tried to be<br />
responsible to the readers. Reporting on things that weren't just a<br />
wonderful great new idea but something that they were going to have<br />
on the market that was going to get some support and everything<br />
else. So anyway. That was a long story of how we got together.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I still don't know how you got together.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We were working in an office about as large as this banquette here<br />
together. Because when we first started working together we didn't<br />
have this other house. So it was the two of us. You had an actual<br />
desk I believe. I had a table that he had made out of particle<br />
board. Yeah it was fancy and I had to put duct tape along it<br />
because the edge was making holes in my clothes.<br />
So we worked in this office back to back, sort of got to know each<br />
other, and became friends, little by little. He said to me, when<br />
you're looking for this building, it would be a good thing if there<br />
was a place for me to live because I'm in the process of getting<br />
separated from my wife. Which it turned out you didn't do right<br />
away but eventually you did. Right?<br />
<br />
David: Well, it was three months later. That was right away in a sense.<br />
What precipitated that was we had a woman that was working in the<br />
mailroom and she got in cahoots with somebody in the accounting<br />
department and they started working a little embezzlement.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was this at D.E.C. or at...<br />
<br />
David: Pardon?<br />
<br />
Kevin: at DEC or...<br />
<br />
Betsy: At Creative Computing.<br />
<br />
David: No, at Creative Computing. This was just after Betsy was hired. In<br />
fact, they had it going on before and I mean they were very good at<br />
it. What they did is they set up a bank account in the name of<br />
Creative Computing in the next county. And they would take very<br />
fourth or fifth check and it might be a subscription, it might be<br />
paying for an ad or something...<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was mostly the advertisers.<br />
<br />
David: Well it was both. And then they put that into their bank account.<br />
And then the one that was in the accounting department would mark<br />
the thing as paid.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, she didn't. That was her mistake.<br />
<br />
David: Well, she didn't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because that wasn't her job.<br />
<br />
David: Well she blew one. In any event it was my advertising manager that<br />
we had sent an overdue notice to one of the advertisers.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Apple.<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Apple. It was Regis McKenna, it was Apple's agency.<br />
<br />
David: And they said, we paid that. And a woman said, well send me proof.<br />
And they did. And we looked at the bank where it was deposited and<br />
then we called in local detective, police department. And they got<br />
the bank records and said, "How much do you think this was?" Well<br />
no they didn't say that, they said, this is probably a lot more<br />
than you thought.<br />
And it turned out to be well over $100,000. And our total annual,<br />
not even profit at that point...well, the gross was just about a<br />
million at that point, not quite, but close to it. So $100,000 was<br />
a big, big chunk 10 percent.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When was this?<br />
<br />
David: '78. And, so, obviously we fired these two. And then the court<br />
finally, well they determined that they had also, one of them had been<br />
involved in welfare fraud and other stuff and the court ordered<br />
them to pay it back at the rate of, I don't know...<br />
<br />
Betsy: 47 cents a week.<br />
<br />
David: It was some tiny amount.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Still paying you... [laughter and crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Course they'll never pay anything.<br />
<br />
David: And we got one payment you know, and that was it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And she was ordered to do public service. Like who wants someone<br />
doing public service for them who's done something like that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Magazines back then, probably any business but, they were a hotbed<br />
of intrigue. You had that happened and then the whole Bike Magazine<br />
getting stolen.<br />
<br />
David: So Betsy actually, in response to that brought, in response to the<br />
embezzlement brought in her Sister-in-Law Bobbi, and I think your<br />
mother too...<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Bobbi's mother.<br />
<br />
David: Bobbi's mother, OK. But one to...<br />
<br />
Betsy: My mother in law. I was a widow at the time.<br />
<br />
David: ...do some of the accounting because we didn't have an accountant<br />
and wanted just to help out and make some calls to advertisers and<br />
say can you speed up your payment a little bit and also calls to<br />
people that we owed money to, hey we're going to be maybe a little<br />
late. It really didn't look good. That was just a huge amount of<br />
money and so we had to stretch things out and hope that the growth<br />
continued so we could recover some of this.<br />
Betsy really rescued us there. It was amazing. We finally did<br />
stretch things out. What precipitated the separation with my wife<br />
at the time is I went home and told her this had happened and<br />
everything.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Thanksgiving weekend. Day before Thanksgiving.<br />
<br />
David: The day before Thanksgiving is when we got all the information from<br />
the police department and I went home to my wife and she said, "You<br />
dumb...," well I won't repeat the whole thing but, "You are so<br />
stupid. You trust people." "Yes, I trust people." "You shouldn't<br />
trust people like that. Get out of the house. I can't put up with<br />
this anymore." So it was a good thing we had a two family house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had this two family house.<br />
<br />
David: I moved into the bedroom on one side.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He had his office on one side of the top floor in the back bedroom<br />
and his bedroom in the back bedroom on the other side and his<br />
kitchen. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is this the place I was reading about where your bedroom was above<br />
the kitchen?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yes. The Ted Nelson.<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, a lot of things precipitated. Because of that, we had to<br />
make some other changes on personnel and move some people around. I<br />
think after that then Betsy took more of a role in the editorial<br />
end of things.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Stayed there until the bitter end.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The bitter end. Actually, I was there after he was gone.<br />
<br />
David: That's true.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ziff continued to pay me several months after they closed the<br />
magazine to stay behind and clean up because we have a 75,000<br />
square foot building. Make sure that we don't dispose of the<br />
hardware and just basically get it ready.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When you quit at the phone company to start a magazine, that must<br />
have been scary.<br />
<br />
David: I had left Digital Equipment in 1974, and I'm sure you read the<br />
whole rationale behind that, and joined AT&T in marketing,<br />
educational marketing. Same thing I was doing at DEC but obviously<br />
marketing different products to a different mix of customers. AT&T,<br />
back then and perhaps today, they had a real formula that you're in<br />
a job for two years and then they rotate you out or they put you in<br />
another job.<br />
The way AT&T works is they have certain steps. There's a manager<br />
and then a director level. There are levels, one, two, three, four,<br />
five. The operating companies, like Pacific Bell and so on, have<br />
similar steps that are considered a half step below AT&T. What they<br />
do is they rotate you out to an operating company, a half step<br />
promotion, they rotate you back into AT&T, now you're a full step.<br />
You never get a full step in one company.<br />
<br />
They had offered me a rotation to Southern Bell. Birmingham,<br />
Alabama. "No. No." Then probably two or three months later said<br />
we've got an opening in Wisconsin Tel. "Oh my gosh. Come on,<br />
something sensible." I turned them down, which was bad. You can't<br />
turn down. If you turn down three you might as well retire.<br />
<br />
The third one was, in a sense, it wasn't a promotion but it was a<br />
sideways job jump within AT&T itself. I went from having the<br />
education group, which was about eight people, to corporate<br />
communications, which is about 100 people and a huge budget. I was<br />
responsible for all of the marketing communications for the whole<br />
Bell system. Not advertising.<br />
<br />
We had seminar centers, put out all kinds of educational pamphlets,<br />
even a magazine for our customers on how to use the equipment. I<br />
was doing that. It's a big job. It's a 50 hour a week job. Creative<br />
Computing was halfway down the block. I'd go there at lunch time,<br />
see how things were doing.<br />
<br />
As I said a little bit ago, when it looked like we were going to<br />
hit a million dollars I said I've got to get serious about this.<br />
That's when I resigned from AT&T. That was probably the first, I<br />
shouldn't say the first, but that was a major problem with my wife<br />
at that time. You're leaving AT&T? You're leaving all those<br />
benefits? What are you doing, you idiot? We were on the downward<br />
spiral at that point and then the embezzlement just sealed the<br />
whole thing.<br />
<br />
Leaving any job for an unknown thing like you started a little<br />
company and you leave your day job. You're making a real<br />
commitment.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Even once you were at Creative full time, it looks like you did a<br />
lot of everything. You were writing, you were doing programming,<br />
you were being the editor, the publisher and the editor which is<br />
not done anymore.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. I don't know. You can correct me. I don't think I was a<br />
control freak.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. You had Phil Ellenberg. You had just hired Phil Ellenberg as<br />
the advertising manager. Richie was doing it. Where did he come<br />
from? He came from some respectable place. He came from some<br />
respectable place, Phil Ellenberg.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, he did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was like a real person who had a real job, not like the rest of<br />
us. He was the ad manager. I think once you made the step to leave<br />
AT&T then you mostly concentrated on the editorial. You weren't<br />
selling ads and writing and you had Steve North who was doing a lot<br />
of the editorial.<br />
<br />
David: At the beginning, yeah. The thing is I'd be lying if I said I knew<br />
how things were going to go, I knew this was going to be a huge<br />
magazine some day. I had no clue. When I started Creative Computing<br />
there weren't even personal computers at that point. I was<br />
convinced, I guess, that they would come about. I had no idea that<br />
it would be three months later that the Altair came about. It was<br />
more that I thought that an educational magazine like we had been<br />
publishing at DEC should continue.<br />
DEC had dropped off. They stopped publishing Edu when I left the<br />
education group. Well, they published an issue or two but they<br />
really weren't serious about continuing it. Then you had all of<br />
these people out here in the west coast, the Hewlett Packard<br />
computers. They were publishing some good software, they had some<br />
good arrangements with Minnesota Educational Computers Consortium<br />
and some others to distribute stuff that they developed, but there<br />
was no information source for schools and teachers and kids that<br />
were using computers.<br />
<br />
That's what I envisioned initially, but then once the Altair and<br />
the others came out people buy this kit computer and say what can I<br />
do with it? We've got these programs that will run.<br />
<br />
Betsy: First you have to steal Basic.<br />
<br />
David: What?<br />
<br />
Betsy: First you have to steal Basic.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I noticed that, I don't know what it's called, the public opinion<br />
or I don't know the word, this part here. The number one magazine<br />
of computer applications.<br />
<br />
David: That was a Davis thing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It started off first issue a non-profit magazine of educational and<br />
recreational. That was November 1970. May/June 1975 the words non-<br />
profit disappeared.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He never set it up as a non-profit.<br />
<br />
David: I did not.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You started making a profit.<br />
<br />
David: That's right. [laughs]<br />
Betsy; It was the unintentionally non-profit.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Three years later it quietly changed into the number one magazine<br />
of computer applications and software.<br />
<br />
David: That was when Ziff Davis took over.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Really? No, that was '78.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, that was '78.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, '78.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He stayed until the end.<br />
<br />
David: Right. OK. You're right. Who knows. We changed it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It seemed like a good idea at the time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's clearly a shift from education to education plus other things.<br />
<br />
David: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think it was when he realized that if you really wanted to make a<br />
profit you had to leave education behind because teachers want<br />
everything for free, or they certainly did then.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They have some websites for teachers. They still do. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Schools, teachers, yeah, they want everything for free and they get<br />
a lot for free. Places like Huntington Computer Project. There was<br />
one out here, Oregon. Yes, there was. I think it was based right<br />
here in Portland. It would have been, right, if it was in Oregon?<br />
Yes, there was a computing consortium at that time, Hewlett Packard<br />
oriented.<br />
Then you had People's Computer Company down in California that was<br />
sort of providing stuff to schools. They were mostly into<br />
alternative schools and there were a lot of them in the Bay area at<br />
that time. In fact, there was a magazine or a newspaper, big thing,<br />
I don't know how often it came out, called the "De-school Primer".<br />
<br />
It was for people that...I won't say they were hippies but<br />
basically homeschoolers but they got together and said, "We're<br />
going to educate our kids outside of the public education system<br />
but we don't want to do it individually. We'll get together." There<br />
was a big movement there and they were into computers, unlike the<br />
public schools back in '75, '76.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Homeschooling back then was very avant-garde. It was not approved.<br />
<br />
David: Not like today. The shift away from education. That, of course, was<br />
partially driven by the hardware that was then available to people<br />
at home.<br />
When I first started the magazine, I had four editors over the<br />
years, five I guess, but Steve Gray had been publishing a<br />
newsletter, what he called the "Amateur Computer Group Newsletter".<br />
It was for engineers who were scavenging up old parts from<br />
Honeywell and IBM and GE and DEC and trying to put together a<br />
computer. You've got success stories and here's how you can make<br />
this worth together.<br />
<br />
That was a long way away from an Altair, but that's what I was<br />
focusing on, people that were doing that and education. Changed our<br />
focus. You're right. Good observation.<br />
<br />
Kevin: After that, do you feel the focus changed in the next 10 years?<br />
<br />
David: The focus changed largely due to selling the magazine to Ziff<br />
Davis.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When's that?<br />
<br />
David: We were negotiating for a while and I think the sale finally went<br />
through in '83. Yeah, '83. Maybe late '82 but roughly then. They<br />
felt that you need more of a business focus, small business and<br />
people running businesses out of their home. That's where it<br />
started but then we got into real small businesses. I shouldn't say<br />
real but a store front or a small manufacturer, something like<br />
that. That's probably a direction we would not have gone. I<br />
wouldn't have gone on my own.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had a magazine called "Small Business Computing." Remember?<br />
<br />
David: That's right, we did. I would have kept Creative more targeted on<br />
the home market and still education, to some extent, but more on<br />
the home and people that were running a business, a single<br />
entrepreneur. You could review a spreadsheet or a small business<br />
computer or higher end printer or something but not lift it up to<br />
that next level up.<br />
When you're owned by somebody else and they say this is what we<br />
want to do you've got to be responsive to it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Why did you sell? Was it something that had to be done? I've read<br />
the official line.<br />
<br />
David: I think the official line is pretty close to the real line. What<br />
happened is the first magazine, maybe not the very first but the<br />
first sizable magazine, to sell was the Byte and they sold to<br />
McGraw Hill. Then there were three or four other sales. At the time<br />
there were maybe eight special interest publishers in the country.<br />
You had Hurst and CBS magazine and Ziff Davis. Maybe eight serious<br />
ones. There were some others that were, "Oh, it'd be nice if we<br />
could get into it."<br />
What happened is all of us at that point were spending maybe<br />
$100,000, $150,000 on circulation promotion. McGraw Hill says we<br />
want to get out there, we're going to spend a million dollars.<br />
They're mailing 10 times as much as we are. They're going to trade<br />
shows with big, elaborate booths and handing out all kinds of...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Free magazines.<br />
<br />
David: Not only free magazines but other stuff. That was half of it. The<br />
other half, which was probably more than half, was the advertising<br />
sales. We were using reps. We had different reps in different parts<br />
of the country, paying the rep commission on the advertising. When<br />
you are a McGraw Hill or a Hurst or a Ziff Davis you've got an in-<br />
house staff. They would have a reception at one of the computer<br />
conferences, a big deal.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We used to have a hospitality suite at the hotels in some of these<br />
conferences and then we would bring little hunks of cheese that we<br />
cut up from home and sneak the bottles of wine up the back stairway<br />
and they were having these big things with the giant balls of<br />
shrimp.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. It was just an order of magnitude different than what we<br />
could do. What happened, really, was that it got to the point where<br />
there were only three, really two, serious bidders that were still<br />
looking for a magazine and there are still about four magazines,<br />
four decent quality magazines, on the market and one was Compute,<br />
one was Interface Age. Personal Computing had just sold, there was<br />
us, and I forget who the fourth one was. There was four.<br />
<br />
Kevin: There were more magazines than buyers at this point.<br />
<br />
David: That's right. There were a lot more magazines, too, but there were<br />
four major players. One of the buyers, I didn't really regard them<br />
as serious, and that was Atari. I think they wanted to back into<br />
the thing. The two buyers left were CBS, and they had a magazine<br />
division at that time, and Ziff Davis and that was it. I said,<br />
"Man, I've got to make a deal here." That's what happened.<br />
I look back with hindsight. I said the guy, Robert I forget his<br />
last name, that owned Compute magazine, he held out. He held out<br />
until the end and he said, "I'm better than Interface Age," and he<br />
was and whatever the other one was, Family Computing, "I'm better<br />
than them." He got a really nice payoff from CBS because it was the<br />
last one and they wanted him. I don't know. If I had held off a<br />
little more would I have gotten more? Probably.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How much did you get?<br />
<br />
David: Can we publish this figure?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't know. I don't think we ever have.<br />
<br />
David: No, we never have.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's my chance for a scoop.<br />
<br />
David: Pardon?<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's my chance for a scoop.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] I'd rather not say. I can tell you Compute, if you ever<br />
read that number, which you will, it was seven times that much. It<br />
was huge. Huge. At that point, I think CBS just said we've got to<br />
get into this. We've really got to do something. The big loser was<br />
Bob Jones at Interface Age. He had a good magazine. That was a<br />
good, solid magazine. Bob Jones, he went to shows, he was always in<br />
a suit and tie. He would have fit into the corporate environment<br />
very well but he held out too long. I think he was holding out for<br />
even more.<br />
That's what I was afraid of. Less than a year later he was out of<br />
business. There was no way you could compete with these big guys.<br />
I mean Ziff instantly started having these receptions at PC expo...<br />
<br />
Betsy: They had ad reps all over the country.<br />
<br />
David: Ad reps, yeah. Oh my gosh. So we would not have survived.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So again, you timed it right.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Not exactly right but yes. Wasn't bad. Wasn't bad.<br />
<br />
Kevin: But Ziff didn't have it for very long before they let it go. It was<br />
only a couple of years.<br />
<br />
David: It was almost four years. Three and a half years. They did a study,<br />
and this is one of the classics. I've been making a presentation at<br />
Leslie Park last year on the 10 biggest blunders in personal<br />
computing, and actually it's up to 12 now. One was, and I still<br />
feel that it was huge, is that Ziff Davis analyzed that market in<br />
'85 and determined that the home market, the market for home<br />
computers, had reached saturation. Five percent of the homes have a<br />
computer. That's it.<br />
There were three things, three major conclusions from their survey.<br />
I think probably one and a half of them were pretty good and one<br />
and a half were just absolutely wrong. The home market reaching<br />
saturation, wrong. The second one was that they said that the<br />
magazines that would be successful would be those that were focused<br />
on specific brands of computers. Are you getting all that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: With the IBM PC it really brought standardization to the industry.<br />
Their analysis was that Apple and PC were going to be the dominant<br />
players in the future and in that they were right. They said we've<br />
got to have a magazine that's just focused on those two and they<br />
did. What was their Apple magazine? They had two Apple magazines.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A+.<br />
<br />
David: But they also had the one for the Mac.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mac User.<br />
<br />
David: They had two Apple magazines and then PC. PC they spun off a whole<br />
bunch. PC Week.<br />
<br />
Betsy: PC Junior.<br />
<br />
David: A bunch of them. In any event, they were right in that. The other<br />
one that they were semi-right, in the long term future they were<br />
totally wrong but in the short term future they were probably<br />
right, and that they looked at...We had been covering bulletin<br />
board systems. CompuServe, whatever its predecessor was, basically<br />
online type of stuff.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Genie.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. They said that's just a flash in a pan, online stuff. Well, in<br />
'85 it was. It took a while. It took another 8 to 10 years for that<br />
but then oh my God. You know what's happened today. If they had<br />
stuck with Creative Computing and rather than trying to make it a<br />
small business focused magazine but kept the home and the online<br />
focus we would have owned the Internet market today, absolutely<br />
owned it. It would have been a bigger magazine than all the others<br />
put together. Hindsight is 20/20.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I know it wasn't your choice but do you have regret about that?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: At the time it was devastating.<br />
<br />
David: Absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was like someone killing your child.<br />
<br />
David: At the time, we sat in these meetings up in Stanford, Connecticut,<br />
of all places. The reason for that is Bill Ziff. What happened in<br />
the interim a year or two after they purchased Creative Computing<br />
and PC, Bill Ziff came down with cancer really big time and was<br />
afraid of dying next year. So he was moving all of his resources<br />
and the holdings outside of New York to avoid really major<br />
taxation. I'm not sure that Connecticut was much better but he was<br />
splitting them between Connecticut and Florida. Anyway, we wound up<br />
having a bunch of meetings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was trying to maintain residence in Connecticut.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I guess that was it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was living in the Crown Plaza.<br />
<br />
David: I remember the last one. We were up at the hotel.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Crown Plaza. It was Stanford, it wasn't Harvard.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, Stanford.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I said Harvard.<br />
<br />
David: When they finally came and said we're going to shut this down. That<br />
was a devastating time. We probably could have continued to work<br />
for Ziff if we had been willing to go into New York but when you<br />
get used to working a mile or two from where you live the idea of<br />
commuting into New York, who knows what the job would have been.<br />
Bye. That was it. That was, in retrospect, a mistake.<br />
The other thing that happened as a result of Bill Ziff having this<br />
bout with cancer is that Ziff Davis sold off all of their other<br />
special interest magazines. Popular Boating, Popular Photography.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yachting, Modern Bride.<br />
<br />
David: They had a big group of travel magazines. Actually, one of the<br />
things they did after Creative Computing was to shut down...we got<br />
friendly with the publisher and some of the people in the traveling<br />
division and we started doing some freelance travel writing.<br />
I was writing a monthly column for one of the travel magazines that<br />
went to travel agents on automating your travel office and so on,<br />
which was an interesting thing because there's a small business<br />
that really depended upon computers with the reservation systems<br />
and all the airlines had a different reservation system. You had to<br />
have Saber.<br />
<br />
A lot of them would go with one and make an agreement with somebody<br />
else to make their other reservations. In any event, it was a bad<br />
system and I was writing a column on how to make this work for you.<br />
As you know, I don't know how many months later we got into the<br />
Atari camp.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was your next gig?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. It was Joe Sugarman, remember, that hooked us up with Atari.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I thought it was Neil Harris.<br />
<br />
David: He was the one we worked with but it was Sugarman.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because he came from Commodore. I didn't know it was Joe Sugarman.<br />
<br />
David: He ran a company called JS&A for Joe Sugarman and Associates. They<br />
were the first one that took these full page ads in lots of<br />
different magazines and the quarter page...<br />
<br />
Betsy: The first advertorials.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, advertorial. The first print advertorials. Really serious<br />
stuff. Out of that, he spawned at least a dozen other companies.<br />
Sharper Image is a Sugarman and it's a spinoff. They've got a whole<br />
page just focused on this air ionizer or some crazy product, but he<br />
sold tons of that stuff. Then he started offering courses. He was<br />
on the verge of doing some big deal with Atari and so he knew all<br />
the people out there.<br />
I had taken his course and started running the ad. In fact, there's<br />
probably one in one of those issues that is basically a Sugarman<br />
ad. And so anyway, you took the course, too. So we got to know him.<br />
He got to know us, and we kept up. And, oh, OK. Creative Computing<br />
has folded, and I'm trying to get something going with Atari and<br />
getting their magazine really serious. And so he was the one that<br />
hooked us up with them. By the way, I'm surprised that you don't<br />
have Atari Explorer on your website<br />
<br />
Kevin: On the website? Well, the deal with my Atari magazines website is<br />
I've always strove to get permission. Atari can't be owned by the<br />
same company for more than three months at time.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's hard to get permission that way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You can't get permission. But it's out there, elsewhere. There are<br />
other archivists who don't bother to get permission. That's another<br />
good way to do things. Yeah, it's out there. I think Archive.org<br />
has it.<br />
<br />
David: Really? Yeah, because I hadn't seen it. I was looking for<br />
something...I still get inquires every once in a while from<br />
somebody that wants something in one of the previous magazines that<br />
we've published.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That's why I don't' risk it. There's a few magazine that I just<br />
absolutely would not, because it's owned by some giant monolith<br />
corporation now, and they need to hold on everything even if it's<br />
30 years old.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because someday they might be able to make money from it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right. That's why that's not there.<br />
Talk to me about...You did some weird stuff. The weird stuff I'm<br />
thinking of is the board game.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: "Computer Rage."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We just saw that. We might not have even remembered what it was it,<br />
but we saw it last night at the museum.<br />
<br />
David: They have one in the Collection's area of the Computer Museum. They<br />
didn't even know that we published it. I thought, "Look at this."<br />
<br />
Kevin: You did Computer Rage, which was weird; I want to ask you about<br />
that. You did the record album.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The record album made way more sense than the game.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, well it was a guy named Allan. He was a colonel at that time<br />
and he came to see me with the idea for the computer game.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I forgot about that.<br />
<br />
David: He was a colonel in the Army and had something to do with<br />
educational programs. The Army said people should know more about<br />
how computers work and everything else. He said, "The games that<br />
are on the market are pretty tacky and not fun. I've devised<br />
something." We worked together with him. We finally decided, "All<br />
right. We'll publish this game." By the way, he's a general and<br />
finally retired.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But he's not financing his retirement with the royalties of the game.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: No, not at all.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Will anyone buy this?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We did overprint.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't a big seller or big success, but we sold enough of them.<br />
Now the record was a little different. There was a guy named Dick<br />
Moberg who, at the time, was the president of the Philadelphia Area<br />
Computer Society. The first two personal computer festivals were<br />
actually in New Jersey, not the west coast. The West Coast Computer<br />
Faire came later with Jim Warren and that group. John Dilks started<br />
this computer festival in Atlantic City. This was before Atlantic<br />
City was a big casino place, but...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well, it was a casino place, but...<br />
<br />
David: ...but it was pretty tacky.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It still is.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Not like now.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not like now where it's so classy.<br />
<br />
David: In any event, they were having some issues with the hotel and the<br />
convention center in Atlantic City. Dick Moberg said, "We people in<br />
Philadelphia can do a better job than you guys in New Jersey." And<br />
he got together with what was his name? Lenny? And<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh! Saul Levis.<br />
<br />
David: Saul Levis, who was the president of the New Jersey amateur<br />
computer group. The two of them got together and said yeah, it'll<br />
be more convenient if we do a thing in Philadelphia. And Saul<br />
Levis, he had put together the first Trenton computer festival. It<br />
wasn't a big huge thing; it's gotten to be gigantic. In any event<br />
they said OK, we'll do this. At that point, this was '78; the Apple<br />
had just come out and people were making little plug-in<br />
peripherals.<br />
There was a company that...I'm not going to be able to remember who<br />
it was. They made a nice little plug-in board for the Apple. What<br />
they had was a very nice thing on the screen where you could<br />
position notes and then have them played back. So it was a visual<br />
programming of music.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Music Construction Center?<br />
<br />
Betsy: There were ads for it in magazines.<br />
<br />
David: No, it was a guy out of Denver. I don't remember. Anyway, before<br />
that everything had appeared line by line. But there were some<br />
reasonable playback systems that were starting to come on the<br />
market for the S-100 bus. There were about four of them. The<br />
programming was a little bit harrier, but nonetheless they sounded<br />
OK. And then there was still the leftovers in a sense that people<br />
that were doing work on mainframes to process music.<br />
So Dick Moberg said, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could get a number<br />
of these together?" And of course there's the Philadelphia<br />
Orchestra, we'll make it a Philadelphia Computer Music Festival! So<br />
it was largely his idea, but then, how do you publicize it? Well,<br />
you've got this magazine that's in your backyard, that was willing<br />
to recruit some people and publicize it. So we got about...I don't<br />
know at the festival there were probably 25 or 30 people that had<br />
stuff.<br />
<br />
They recorded it all, which in retrospect was a bit of a mistake<br />
because they had problems with one of the two channels in the<br />
stereo. They had the big reel-to-reel tape recorder, one of the<br />
channels was seriously too low. And then they said, "Well, we've<br />
got this wonderful tape; what are we going to do with it?" And I<br />
said, "Well, I'll do something with it."<br />
<br />
I hooked up with a studio in the city that made records, and we<br />
went in there and corrected the low channel a little bit, not<br />
totally, but enough that it sounded like stereo. And put together a<br />
vinyl record!<br />
<br />
I edited out a lot of the poor quality performances, made the<br />
record, and that sold! It sold pretty well. Our biggest problem was<br />
shipping. How do you ship a 12-inch vinyl record without it<br />
breaking? But that sold pretty well. That, of course, died off<br />
along with everything else when Creative Computing got killed by<br />
Ziff. But, I still had the original test pressing of that, the<br />
original, original.<br />
<br />
I played it back, and it sounded very good. Put it into, I forget<br />
what the software was, but, it was one, the digital routine. It<br />
would have been nice if I still had the original tape, but, I<br />
didn't. But, OK, it's got a little bit of deterioration, going to a<br />
record.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, we're not talking about losing overtones of a<br />
violin up at 15,000 hertz. It was within a narrow band, to begin<br />
with, in any event. But that did let me totally correct the left<br />
channel and bring it up to what it should be. I put that out. I'm<br />
selling CDs now, of that.<br />
<br />
In fact, a guy from Australia ordered one, and obviously, the<br />
postage to send anything overseas is a lot more. He said, "Why<br />
don't you just make MP3 files out of it?" Because, they're WAV<br />
files, the way they are now. I go, "OK."<br />
<br />
This is very recent, like within the last couple of weeks, I<br />
downloaded some software, "Convert WAV to MP3," converted it, sent<br />
them the files. They said, "That's great." What I think what I'll<br />
probably do is try to figure out how I can make them available from<br />
a website.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You've apparently forgotten that, like, 10 years ago, I did that.<br />
They're there.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. I know.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They're at vintagecomputermusic.com.<br />
<br />
David: Are they MP3s?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Well, then, I don't have to do it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You dummy.<br />
<br />
David: Bam. I did remember. I didn't know that you did them all. I thought<br />
you did a sample.<br />
<br />
Kevin: No. They're all there. I can see you're getting reflux.<br />
<br />
David: Boom. I wasted a little time. I waste a lot of time, these days.<br />
That was a cool thing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just think it was neat that you guys were willing to take chances<br />
with weird stuff.<br />
<br />
David: Where we took chances with really weird stuff was in the software.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Software publishing?<br />
<br />
David: We had a brand called, Sensational Software. Unfortunately, Ziff<br />
decided it was competing with some potential advertisers, which it<br />
was, in a sense. They killed it off. But, we had some really good<br />
stuff. We had the Apple game, what the heck was it? It was ported<br />
directly over from the arcade games.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Was it, "Space Invaders"?<br />
<br />
David: "Space Invaders."<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was a clone of, "Space Invaders"?<br />
<br />
David: It was the real.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You got it from, Jeff Lee's guy.<br />
<br />
David: Because, "Space Invaders," the Japanese game, was one of the first<br />
full-sized console video games where they used a general-purpose<br />
chip. "Space Invaders," was programmed for the 6502, Apple.<br />
We bought it from this Japanese company, and we had the only real<br />
"Space Invaders" game. That was one, and a couple of others that we<br />
really could have gone places with. That was just about the time<br />
that Ziff came in and said, "Nah, you can't have this anymore."<br />
<br />
They were into printed media, so, they kept the books going, but,<br />
not any of the other stuff. The other thing we had, was, speaking<br />
of computer music, a little division, that probably could have<br />
gotten a lot bigger, called Peripherals Plus. We were marketing a<br />
little computer music board, it was an S-100 bus once. But if we<br />
had then...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Didn't we have a plotter, too?<br />
<br />
David: Yep. We had about five or six interesting, low-level products. But,<br />
again, Ziff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That stuff was really competing with the advertisers.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Obviously, that wasn't our intent. But, yes it was. We also<br />
offered courses at that time. Do you remember, at County College?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't.<br />
<br />
David: That was just at when we moved into the new building at Hanover. We<br />
had two people that were doing that.<br />
<br />
Betsy: One of them was that crazy, Larry guy. He was seriously weird.<br />
<br />
David: County College of Morris, we reached an agreement that we would<br />
teach their Introductory Computer course. Not for their day<br />
students, but they offered evening courses, adult education, we<br />
were doing that. Fingers in a lot of pies, at that point.<br />
Actually, from that standpoint, it was, probably, good that Ziff<br />
got us a little bit more focused, and back to the roots of<br />
publishing. Getting spread a little thin.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You went to Atari, got the Atari game, and you did the "Atari<br />
Explorer," right?<br />
<br />
David: "Atari Explorer." They had had an occasional publication, not<br />
really a magazine, but one that was focused on the games, and they<br />
decided that they could start that one up again. It started up with<br />
a new name. We called it, "Atarian." It was focused, basically, on<br />
video games. You buy one of their video games and you get an issue.<br />
Anyway, there were different ways that they were going to promote<br />
it.<br />
But, a year later Nintendo just, absolutely, buried "Atarian," in<br />
'89. They kept Atari Spore going for, I think, two more issues,<br />
right?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Was it two?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember the details.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't much.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I remember why they killed it.<br />
<br />
David: Ms. Feisty here. Come on. You've got to tell the story here.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They were playing games with our printer. Production schedule.<br />
Everybody had a production schedule. We never missed our production<br />
date, getting things to the printer, getting them mailed. We just<br />
did it because that's what you had to do. I will probably get sued<br />
for this. Atari started not paying the printer and the printer says<br />
we're not going to print this until we get paid. The date kept<br />
slipping and slipping and the subscribers would be calling up and<br />
saying, "Where's my magazine?"<br />
This went on for.. it was bi-monthly. It went on for maybe six months. I<br />
finally wrote an editorial in which I explained to the readers<br />
exactly what was going on. They didn't see it until it was printed.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
David: That didn't get into the magazine, though.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It did.<br />
<br />
David: That's right, it did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They never saw it. We were producing it out of Mendham<br />
New Jersey and printing it in eastern Pennsylvania and they never<br />
saw it until it was too late. My tenure was cut short but I didn't<br />
really care at that point. I was sick of them. It was really hard.<br />
They're not easy people to deal with, even when the owners last for<br />
more than three months. That was my suicide by editorial. The only<br />
time in my life I've ever been fired.<br />
<br />
David: I didn't realize they didn't read that beforehand but I should<br />
have. I should have.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] I probably wouldn't have gotten fired if they had.<br />
<br />
David: That was kinda the straw that broke the camel's back.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But then John Jainschigg kept doing it a little bit.<br />
<br />
David: I know. In a lot of cases, particularly with the games magazine,<br />
they wanted to approve everything that went in it. If you do an<br />
objective product review, you call it like it is. Oh my gosh, there<br />
was one, it wasn't just one product but a roundup after Consumer<br />
Electronics' show, and I don't remember what it was. Atari had<br />
brought out some new products that really weren't ready to go.<br />
In some cases I just said, "I'm not going to say anything about<br />
this one or these two or three. I'll focus on the ones that are<br />
ready to go or are in good shape." Oh my gosh. "What about this?<br />
This is a wonderful thing." "Well, maybe it will be but it isn't<br />
yet." We had issues all along on censorship and them changing what<br />
we had written and everything. As Betsy said, they were not nice<br />
people to work with. I forget, the two brothers.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Trammell.<br />
<br />
David: Trammell, yeah. That came from Commodore.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Jack and somebody else. Jack and his brother.<br />
<br />
David: It was interesting because yesterday I saw Nolan Bushnell. He was<br />
at that event. Nolan was flamboyant, but basically he had integrity<br />
and he was an honest guy. Man, oh man. Didn't stay and the<br />
corporation changed after he left.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Then you're done with Atari and then it's straight to military<br />
vehicles there?<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] No.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was a hiatus.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, man. We published magazines, in-house magazines, for a couple<br />
other organizations. Did one for Nabisco called...I don't even<br />
remember but it was for their marketing department. Published that<br />
for some period of time and then they decided to bring it in-house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was more like a newsletter.<br />
<br />
David: It was 16 pages. It was getting there.<br />
<br />
Betsy: 16 pages is a newsletter.<br />
<br />
David: All right. Magazine format. Let's put it that way. We did some<br />
fulfillment. Basically, a lot of freelance writing on the travel<br />
field.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Stuffed dogs. The stuffed dogs. Remember those four dogs for my<br />
brother?<br />
<br />
David: That's fulfillment. Fulfillment for Con Edison. I published a<br />
couple newsletters for a while, one called "Effective Investing"<br />
and one called "Effective Communication" for writers. We're talking<br />
early '90s.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was when people still cared, thought that there might be a<br />
correct way to do something and they wanted to know what it was.<br />
<br />
David: That was focused on "Take this computer and start to use it as a<br />
tool. Don't be afraid of the thing." '91/'92 not everybody was<br />
using a computer yet or a personal computer. That was the<br />
orientation of that. Then the other thing we got into big time was<br />
we'd been involved with a local rescue mission for men with drug,<br />
alcohol, homeless issues and we were writing and producing their<br />
newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We were producing all of their fundraising material.<br />
<br />
David: We started, I think, with the newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, we did everything. Appeal letters and newsletters and<br />
maintaining their database, the donor database. It took a lot of<br />
time.<br />
<br />
David: We did that for five years. Then '96 I got an opportunity to buy<br />
this crazy military vehicles magazine for people that were<br />
restoring old historic military vehicles. It was a magazine but it<br />
was I guess more of a glorified newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was horrible.<br />
<br />
David: It was horrible but it was really terrible. In fact, the editor or<br />
the publisher, whatever, the owner, he'd take the articles however<br />
the writer would send them. If it was double spaced type, boom,<br />
that's what would appear in the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Save all the typesetting.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He had zero typesetting expense.<br />
<br />
David: Zero editing. He just took anything that came in, put it in. Ads<br />
the same way. Half the ads were hand written. Well, not half, but a<br />
significant number had corrections on them by hand. Oh my gosh. It<br />
was so terrible. I made it into a real magazine and built it up. At<br />
that point the circulation had been about 10,000. We built it up<br />
and we were pushing close to 20,000 magazines. It was a real<br />
magazine. I sold it to Crowsey publications.<br />
Then they, which I did not realize at the time, the owner, Chet<br />
Crowsey, had put the whole company up for sale and he sold the<br />
company a year or two later to some other specialty magazine<br />
publisher. We're talking narrow, narrow niche. They published a lot<br />
of, what'd they call it, white tail bow hunting. Really, really<br />
narrow stuff. Up in northern Wisconsin is where they were based. In<br />
any event, he sold it.<br />
<br />
The new publishers, their whole stick was making money. They<br />
immediately raised the subscription price of military vehicles. We<br />
were charging $18 a year which was fine and they raised it to<br />
$21.95 or something and they raised the advertising rates and<br />
everything else.<br />
<br />
The last I knew, the circulation was back down around 10,000.<br />
[laughs] It doesn't pay off to take that approach. I didn't have<br />
the same emotional connection, with that as I did with Creative<br />
Computing and the other magazines there. But it, fine, you do what<br />
you want with the magazine, it's OK.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You didn't care too much?<br />
<br />
David: Nah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So, what do you guys do now? It seems like charity work and [inaudible<br />
01:18:45] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. I run a non-profit called Beyond the Walls, and he runs his<br />
website and does Bible studies.<br />
<br />
David: Right. Actually, Betsy, the organization she has, she's executive<br />
director of Beyond the Wall, that's gotten huge.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's getting bigger and bigger.<br />
<br />
David: It's gotten huge.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think huge is probably an exaggeration.<br />
<br />
David: Well, not huge like a Gates Foundation thing.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I wish. We started in 2005 with 26 volunteers going to Guatemala to<br />
work with this organization that works with the people who scavenge<br />
in the Guatemala City garbage dump. The dump is in a ravine. It<br />
started in the early '50s and as it has filled up around the edges<br />
they put a couple layers of sand on it and let it sit for a bit and<br />
then the people build houses on it out of scraps and things that<br />
they made.<br />
This organization called Potter's House that we work with has been<br />
working with them for 26 years. They have an education program,<br />
micro-enterprise and health and various things that they do. Since<br />
2005 we've been sending volunteer teams. We're not the only ones<br />
sending volunteer teams down there to build houses and do<br />
healthcare and do stuff with the kids. So we started with 26 and by<br />
the end of the year we'll be well over 150 volunteers. We'll have<br />
three weeks this summer, I'll have 135 over three weeks this<br />
summer.<br />
It started in our backyard and one of the reasons that we wanted<br />
to...It started in the church and we started the organization<br />
partially because it's easier to raise money if you're not a church<br />
and it's also easier to make the volunteer opportunities available<br />
to people. If you say "Oh I'm going to Guatemala." "Oh I'd love to<br />
go with you! Who's going?" "It's my church." "Oh."<br />
But, if it's this local non-profit it's more appealing and we've<br />
really succeeded in doing that because we have people not only from<br />
in our own community, but this year we're going to have a family<br />
from Oklahoma, about six families from Texas, several people from<br />
Florida.<br />
<br />
David: You got the Virginia.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Virginia. It's like oh my goodness, how is this happening?<br />
<br />
Kevin: And everyone goes out to Guatemala and does the [inaudible<br />
01:22:31] ?<br />
[cross talk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. We all meet in Guatemala. I have three teams. One each week,<br />
and I'll be there the whole time and they'll come down and probably<br />
each team will build two or three houses. They'll do medical<br />
clinic, they'll do day camp for kids, soccer or baseball, sports<br />
things.<br />
They were about teenagers, so they love to do the...Everybody does<br />
construction in the morning. Then, in the afternoon teenage girls<br />
and some of the boys who want to do other stuff will help out with<br />
these other kid-related activities. That's what I'm doing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My wife is in Africa this week and last doing something similar.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Cool.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Which is why I have to leave shortly to go get my kids.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: What part of Africa is she in?<br />
<br />
Kevin: She did some stuff for Special Olympics. Then, they were helping<br />
build something at a food bank. I don't know that much yet, because<br />
she's not home yet.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Cool.<br />
<br />
David: That's terrific. She'll be changed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: She keeps telling that she wished I could've come, and I do, too.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You have this kid. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: We've got the two kids. The six-year-old doesn't feed herself real<br />
well.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: She can't drive to school.<br />
<br />
David: Your annual budget has gone from 0 to what? Are you going to hit<br />
about 150, 200,000 this year?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's over 300 already.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, OK. [laughs] 300.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's small potatoes compared to, say...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, but in six, seven years...<br />
<br />
Betsy: As my boss, the Chairman of the Board, and I'm the only employee,<br />
is fond of saying, "The people out there don't realize that we're<br />
just a bunch of schlumps sitting around a table making this stuff<br />
up as we go along. Very good leadership. He's a very good leader.<br />
<br />
David: We were trying to maybe see if we can touch base with the Gates<br />
Foundation when we were up there. Of course... [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: We got a brochure into his hands.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we got a brochure into his hands and some other stuff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was Bill Gates there?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah. I had a picture of him that I had taken at the first<br />
Altair convention in 1976, before he had actually made the deal<br />
with Altair to develop BASIC, well he had said, "I can do it," but<br />
they hadn't signed the whole thing. I've got a picture of him as<br />
a 20-year-old or thereabouts, talking at this little convention.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You showed it to him?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. I gave him a copy of it. The problem I had is that...some<br />
people keep everything. I pretty much give everything away.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, you are lying. You keep everything.<br />
<br />
David: I do keep a lot of stuff. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Then, you give it away later. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Well, when Stan Freiberger was putting together the "Fire in<br />
the Valley" book, I gave him a lot of photographs and I gave him<br />
the originals. Then the publisher said, "It's not good enough. The<br />
photo. You get the negative." OK, they're gone. Never any of that<br />
came back. In fact, what I had to do is scan the photo from the<br />
book to make the print to give to Bill.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Photos of being young and cute.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was his Woody Allen phase. He looked exactly like Woody Allen<br />
did at that phase in his life.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:26:30] too.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm sure there is.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Its got a lot smaller.<br />
<br />
David: She improves with age. Every year.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I saw the picture! You look the same.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, the instant Paul Allen showed up, of course, everybody's<br />
mingling around this museum. All of a sudden there was like an<br />
arrow head over in that direction.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was this sucking sound.<br />
<br />
David: And that wasn't even... then Bill shows up and, oh my God, everybody<br />
has to go see Bill.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was talking to Bob Rynett this morning, the guy who organized it,<br />
and he said, "Oh, Paul was very happy. Paul was very pleased with<br />
the way the event went." He said his only regret was that he and<br />
Bill didn't have enough time to spend with the people. And I'm<br />
thinking, "Well, OK, if you just stayed a little longer."<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Well, at least Paul Allen did come to the dinner.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, he stayed a little longer, but Bill, he was in and out like<br />
a...<br />
<br />
David: Bill was there for maybe an hour.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He just showed up because he had to.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, exactly. It was a cameo.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was this your cameo there?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, yes. There I am. I was thinner then. Oh! There's Ted in his<br />
hat! And Peter Fee! Who's that guy?<br />
<br />
David: Dick Heiser was at the convention and he had one of the hats, a<br />
Xanadu hat.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was wearing one of those hats. The rings were actually silver.<br />
Oh and there's Johnny Anderson. He's the one that wrote that<br />
crazy...<br />
<br />
Oh, and this was our building.<br />
<br />
David: That was the greenhouse garage building that we started. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: And there was a hole. Was it you or my brother that made a hole in<br />
the wall for an air conditioner?<br />
<br />
David: It was your brother.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And the building was painted white after...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is that the air conditioner? You comment about the low tech air<br />
conditioning.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, that was in an actual window. This building had been painted<br />
white after and right about here a hole had been made in the wall<br />
for this through-the-wall air conditioner. It was rented and when<br />
we moved out, we had this hole in the wall. So, my brother takes<br />
this spare ceiling panel that we had. It was white and sort of<br />
stuffed it in the hole and filled it up so that it really didn't<br />
show any more. We never heard any more about it.<br />
<br />
David: That building today is...<br />
<br />
Betsy: They've made it very fancy.<br />
<br />
David: Oh my gosh! It's a boutique shop and it's really nice. And they<br />
didn't even tear it down. It wasn't a tear-down and rebuild. At any<br />
event, we were not into spending money on facilities. Absolutely<br />
not. The last place that we were in was a printing company had<br />
owned it and they had taken three very small houses that backed up<br />
to railroad tracks and then they built a large warehouse at the end<br />
that was relatively modern. Then they just connected the three<br />
houses with little walkway and so we were in the first house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You couldn't tell that it was two houses.<br />
<br />
David: No. The art department was in the second, then the software group<br />
was in the third one. We had our fulfillment and storage and stuff<br />
in the warehouse.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How much money did you spend on the facility?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not much.<br />
<br />
David: We were spending money on expansion, growing, grow, grow. Then Ziff<br />
Davis comes in, they say, "You got this wonderful warehouse."<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's our warehouse now, right?<br />
<br />
David: That's right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It wasn't though, because you owned it.<br />
<br />
David: I know, but in any event, they said we're going to use it. We're<br />
moving some of your operation, advertising, sales into New York,<br />
therefore you will have more space. It wasn't the trade-off of the<br />
same kind of space or anything. What they did is, they have all<br />
these other magazines at that point, things like "Popular Boating"<br />
and "Yachting" and everything else. All of those magazines, when<br />
you subscribed you got a premium. You got a tote bag or something.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A backpack or a cushion.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. They moved all of their premium fulfillment out to our<br />
warehouse. They said, "Because you're not going to have a software<br />
department anymore, so you won't have to ship any software. We're<br />
going to bring all of our premiums out there." We still have<br />
"Yachting" bags.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yachting bags and seat bags.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Speaking of fulfillment that was something that we did. We were<br />
real pioneers in doing our own fulfillment.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: That's true...<br />
<br />
Betsy: All magazines then used fulfillment houses. You would just send all<br />
the little cards and white mail and everything to your fulfillment<br />
house and they would just take care, enter it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Reader service cards and...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Exactly, and then they would send the labels.<br />
<br />
David: Everything went either to Boulder, Colorado, Des Moines, Iowa, or<br />
some place in Florida.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So when you say pioneers, does that mean you were cheap?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well no, because we were not getting good service, we weren't happy<br />
with the service the readers were getting. And so we decided to<br />
bring it in it house, and we brought a program from a company in<br />
Boston that had written a program to run a PDP-11.<br />
<br />
And we did we brought the whole thing in-house. We had our own data<br />
entry people. Did all the caging, taking the money out in-house.<br />
Printed our own labels and ship, because then you had to print them<br />
and ship them because there was no electronic delivery.<br />
<br />
David: You know we were real pioneers there and we did spent some money.<br />
Because PDP-11/70 was not a low-end, with a platter and disk, 12<br />
inch, maybe 15 inch, but a big, big platter drive, and data entry<br />
terminals, DECWriters, VT05. And when Ziff came in, I mean they<br />
were blown away that we were doing our own fulfillment, and doing a<br />
very efficiently.<br />
<br />
And the other thing we were doing also was the reader service<br />
cards. We were doing all our own processing of that. The same<br />
computer is same system. A Mini Data System, that's what it was.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No.<br />
<br />
David: No? OK.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mini data was the one you were using...<br />
<br />
<br />
[Day 2]<br />
<br />
<br />
David: A couple of the questions you asked yesterday got us to thinking<br />
about things we probably should have mentioned or clarified.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK let's go, let me grab a pen.<br />
<br />
David: One of the corrections, Betsy remembered better than I, that the<br />
embezzlement that we were talking about was actually 79 not 78 it<br />
doesn't make a lot of difference but was a year later. It was a<br />
year after I had left my day job, and I was really depending upon<br />
Creative Computing for my income and everything else. So to lose<br />
that was a big blow at that time. So that was...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So that could have put an end to things right there?<br />
<br />
David: Yes absolutely it could have.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was 79 not 78, is what you're saying.<br />
<br />
David: That's what I said it was 79 not 78.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I was going to ask you to move closer to the microphone.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Actually I don't have to do this. My ego is completely uninvolved.<br />
I would go sit and play with the cats.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Please, please be here. You supplement Dave's memory.<br />
<br />
David: Yes exactly, she's very good at that.<br />
<br />
David: And you were there and have some very good stories...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
<br />
[clipped out of audio?]<br />
Betsy: I want to know, how are you going to know how to spell things? He<br />
used the name John Dilks. If you go to write it out, how do you<br />
know how to spell John Dilks?<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'll either Google it, and if it's not in Wikipedia, I'll have to<br />
come back to you and ask, or if they're mentioned in the magazines.<br />
I'll do my best.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm not saying it in a critical way, I'm just impressed that you<br />
don't ask.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just feel this way, I can have everything. I don't have to write<br />
it down. I can concentrate on the conversation, rather than taking<br />
notes.<br />
[restarts]<br />
<br />
<br />
David: OK. One thing I thought would be kind of worthwhile...putting the<br />
whole era of the early computer magazines into a perspective. In a<br />
sense, personal computing itself went through several eras as it<br />
accelerated and became so widespread. It certainly didn't start<br />
that way.<br />
You almost have to look at a period before there were personal<br />
computers -- the pre-personal computer era, which I would say would<br />
be 1972 or so up through '75, when the first computers came out.<br />
<br />
And what was happening then was you had big time-sharing systems.<br />
But then, manufacturers like DEC and HP were making smaller time-<br />
sharing systems for terminals on a computer. Specifically, Bob<br />
Albrecht opened up People's Computer Company down in San Carlos,<br />
San Mateo, one of the "Sans." It was an open to the public place.<br />
What were people going to do with computers? Well, he wrote this<br />
book of What To Do After You Hit Return, of games.<br />
<br />
Then I wrote my book, not for his center, but for people in the<br />
east that had access to the same type of things on DEC computers.<br />
Those two books actually came out in '72, so that was well<br />
before....There was an impetus for people to use computers. Even<br />
though it was mini-computers and they didn't really have their own,<br />
they did have access.<br />
<br />
So that, I think, was an important thing because, then, when the kit<br />
computers first came out, which is '75, we really had the kit<br />
computer era from '75 to around '78. That's when it primary was,<br />
the do-it-yourself, build-it-yourself.<br />
<br />
Well who did those computers appeal to? It was largely people who <br />
were OK with things like soldering guns and that was largely HAM radio<br />
people. You look at "73" magazine and "Radio Electronics," those<br />
were the ones that dragged the hardware people into the field, and<br />
"Popular Electronics," of course, with the Altair in January, '75.<br />
<br />
You had to know something about, and be a little bit capable with<br />
your hands to get into it. That continued but dwindled off by 1980,<br />
because of course, in '78, you had the three biggies, not biggies,<br />
but self-contained, assembled computers: the Commodore PET, TRS-80,<br />
and the Apple all came out in '78. They were proprietary platforms,<br />
nobody was sharing stuff.<br />
<br />
Actually, the S-100 bus was more shareable. More people got a card<br />
that you could plug into the S-100 bus. There was more, but on the<br />
other hand, you had to build it. That was really a stumbling block<br />
for a lot of people. Then Processor Technology with the SOL. OK,<br />
here's an S-100 bus machine, but it's all built. That was a big<br />
leap.<br />
<br />
Anyway, you had the, what I call, proprietary era from '78 to '82.<br />
Then it kind of dwindled off, although Apple certainly kept going.<br />
When the IBM PC came out, '81, '82, '83, that ushered in the<br />
standardization era. Everybody, "OK, we're going to make an IBM PC<br />
clone." It was really only Apple, and to a lesser extent, the Atari<br />
and the Commodore that kept going with their own proprietary stuff.<br />
They really couldn't keep going.<br />
<br />
At that time, we started working with Atari. They using the same<br />
chip that Apple had. I thought, "Man, that's an opportunity. Why<br />
don't they just make an agreement with Apple to run Apple software<br />
and everything." They got a 6502, that family of chips in there,<br />
why not? But that wasn't Atari's way of doing things, as you well<br />
know.<br />
<br />
In any event, they went through those stages. As a new one came<br />
along, the other one died off. That though then affected the<br />
magazines, Creative Computing, we came from the pre-era, in a<br />
sense. From the education applications and people having access to<br />
small, minicomputer time sharing systems. When Altair basic was<br />
announced, then it was the obvious thing that we would port over<br />
programs to that.<br />
<br />
Other magazines such as "Byte" and some of the hardware magazines,<br />
they really came from the HAM radio end of things. Wayne Green, who<br />
started "Byte," was publishing "73," which was the biggest magazine<br />
in HAM radio. HAM fests were one of the earliest places where<br />
computers were, or at least hardware, do-it-yourself computers were<br />
really seen and popularized. Wasn't till a little later that we had<br />
computer festivals.<br />
<br />
The real early computer festivals in '75, '76, had a big overlap<br />
with Ham radio. The early ones in New Jersey. That was the earliest<br />
ones. It was, I think, more, not more, but at least half was<br />
oriented to Ham radio. Then, it broadened out, of course, with more<br />
applications being reproduced. Anyway, I think it's kind of<br />
important to know how things fit into that whole scheme of things.<br />
<br />
Magazines either came from the Ham radio and hardware side of<br />
things. They had a different perspective than those like Creative<br />
Computing.<br />
<br />
Well, Peoples' Computer Company, Bob Aldberg, could have had a real<br />
winning magazine, but he was too much in the alternative mode. So,<br />
Peoples' Computer Company never really made it as a magazine. He<br />
didn't want to do advertising or anything that would...<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was a different avenue. It was more like a tabloid-style<br />
newspaper.<br />
<br />
David: Newspaper, yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was more glossy.<br />
<br />
David: Exactly.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was a very different field.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Again, magazine publishing. I remember, early on, I was on a<br />
TV show, McNeil Lehrer Report on Public Broadcasting. Life Magazine<br />
was being re-launched and Time-Warner was spending a ton of money<br />
on this re-launch. They had the publisher of Life Magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was probably Time-Life back then. I don't think it...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. That's right. It wasn't Time. Well, I think it was close to<br />
the time that they merged. Anyway. Yeah. It was Time-Life. Then,<br />
they had me. Sort of the opposite extreme.<br />
<br />
<br />
[clipped out of audio?]<br />
Kevin: You're going to be covered in cat hair by the time you're here.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, I am sure.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's OK. But it matches and sort of goes with it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. It matches fine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You have kind of a theme here. The black and white.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes. Yes. Sorry to interrupt.<br />
[restarts]<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, they were interviewing both of us. They were going to spend<br />
more money on their first issue than our entire annual budget, for<br />
everything. The difference in big publishers, because we we're<br />
talking about that a little bit yesterday, is huge. Really huge.<br />
Now, the interesting thing is there was a magazine back then. I<br />
don't know if it's still around today, called Folio. It was a<br />
magazine for magazine publishers. They covered all aspects of it.<br />
Subscription fulfillment, typesetting and everything else and the<br />
business aspects of running a magazine.<br />
<br />
They had some figures, which were true for a long period of time.<br />
That one out of seven magazine startups makes it for one year. One<br />
out of seven. That's low. Of those, one out of seven makes it for<br />
five years. So, were talking about...<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think Wayne told me almost the exact same statistic.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. One out of 50 new magazines makes it for five years or more.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: Once you make it five years, you're probably good to go for awhile.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
The new Life Magazine comes back, roaring back in. Where are they<br />
today, or even 10 years later from that point. Gone. Didn't make<br />
it. In any event, yesterday we were talking a little bit about<br />
where did we put all our money.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
David: Well, all our money wasn't an awful lot compared to big publishers.<br />
We were a small player. We're big in that field, but...<br />
<br />
Kevin: You're a big fish in a little bowl.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Yeah. There wasn't a lot. Betsy reminded me this morning that<br />
one of the things we did to, in a sense, keep control, is we bought<br />
our own typesetting equipment.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Used of course.<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Used.<br />
<br />
David: Used. Yes, yes. We didn't want to send stuff out to a typesetter<br />
where... what did you you call it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was the same thing with the fulfillment. You are sending it to a<br />
service that gives your work to a minimum wage person who couldn't<br />
care less. Puts her time in and...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Plus you still had code and things that needed to be done right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Done right. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Otherwise it was useless.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. We didn't typeset the code usually. We would actually pace<br />
down the printouts. Part of it was for efficiency and probably, in<br />
the long run, it was cheaper. Just to turn your typesetting around,<br />
send it out and wait for your galleys to come back. Then you<br />
proofread them. Then you'd send it back. Then they make the<br />
corrections, maybe, and you get it back again. So we said, well...and<br />
then we got this used, CompuGraphic was it?<br />
<br />
David: Mm-hmm. Yep.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Typesetter. Found a young woman who knew typesetting and hired her.<br />
We bought our own stat camera. We always used to have to send all<br />
the stats and V-Luxes out to be made.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: That was huge then before...<br />
<br />
Betsy: ...had our own darkroom.<br />
<br />
David: ...there was computerized publishing. Yeah. We had our own<br />
darkroom and our own stat camera with the thing that goes over a<br />
screen basically to make it into dots.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: a...nd to do that. To make those negatives or V-Luxes, which<br />
are the positive. That was something again. You sent it out and you<br />
get it back.<br />
<br />
I said, "Oh, you know what, we got a little more type here than<br />
expected. We want to crop this." Well, we send it out again, and oh<br />
my gosh. Doing all of that in-house, but it cost money. In a<br />
sense, just for the hardware and capital improvements that you<br />
needed to do that.<br />
<br />
We were spending it on that and expansion into other things like<br />
the software. One of the other ones that I was thinking of that we<br />
did, that certainly, really didn't bring us any tangible reward,<br />
was that we were doing some consulting when we started developing<br />
software. We started doing consulting to places like the<br />
Exploratorium in San Francisco. And Sesame Place. That was a big<br />
one for us.<br />
<br />
Sesame Place was a theme park right in our own backyard in New<br />
Jersey. They were going to have these terminals that you could go<br />
up to. One of the programs was Mix and Match the Muppets. You could<br />
take different parts of Muppets and combine them. We wrote a part<br />
of that routine and a whole bunch of stuff that made computers and<br />
these things not computers but approachable things for kids.<br />
<br />
We did some work for the Capital Children's Museum in Washington<br />
and Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Again, did it help us?<br />
Maybe. Did we gain a little reputation? Maybe. Did it translate to<br />
the bottom line? Probably not. As Betsy said, it was fun for you to<br />
do that, wasn't it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, it was fun. It gave him fun things to do.<br />
<br />
David: That was one way that we, in a sense, spent some money.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It makes sense. You guys were the computer experts, probably by<br />
orders of magnitude. Who are they going to go to?<br />
<br />
David: That's right. Interactive games, yeah. I already had a good selling<br />
book out there that was visible, known. We did a lot of that kind<br />
of stuff. Some of it was just fun to do. Another place where we put<br />
I won't say a lot of money but we went to a lot of these shows,<br />
well, there were some that were strictly personal computer shows,<br />
but then also tried to push into things like the consumer<br />
electronics show.<br />
<br />
We were the only magazine at the consumer electronics. That's a<br />
huge, huge show. Twice a year, one in Chicago and one in Las Vegas.<br />
We'd take the smallest booth that you could but, still, it was a<br />
fair chunk of change to go to that, but that's how I felt we got<br />
the reach. They were pushing at a lower level. That was video games<br />
mostly at that point. Although we weren't in that market, I just<br />
felt that that was someplace that we wanted to be.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you think that was worthwhile?<br />
<br />
David: I don't know. We were mainly looking for retail stores to sell the<br />
magazine. That was my main purpose for going there. No, it probably<br />
wasn't. It probably was not and it cost us a lot of money to go to<br />
the shows. You have to experiment and do those things. We started<br />
reporting on new developments at the consumer electronics show and<br />
there was some overlap with computers but it was mostly video<br />
games. No, it didn't have a real good payoff. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Then there was the Boston show we went to where Betsy's feistiness<br />
really came out. You go to those shows. I'm not talking about one<br />
of these local computer shows or something. You go to a big show.<br />
You've got to use union labor. We had a computer at our booth. We<br />
wanted to plug it in. You're going to plug in your computer? No,<br />
you can't plug it in. You've got to hire an electrician for an hour<br />
for $75 to plug in your computer.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was a bit extreme. I don't think that was actually true.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know how much it was but you had to use union labor for<br />
different things. Betsy took exception to that at one show and<br />
actually came to blows.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was carrying stuff off the show floor. We were trying to get out.<br />
It was in Boston and we were going to drive back and we were trying<br />
to...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Go home at the end of the show?<br />
<br />
Betsy: ...go home at the end of the show. We were just carrying our<br />
cartons of leftover magazines and books and some union guy comes to<br />
me and starts telling me you can't do this and he was being very<br />
rude. So I punched him in the arm. [laughs] They were not happy.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you have to hire a special punching person to do that?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yes, exactly. I should have consulted with the shop steward before<br />
doing that.<br />
<br />
David: There was a follow-up to that. I'm not absolutely sure but I think<br />
the guy that was running that show was Shelley Adelman. He then<br />
approached us after that little incident. You can't do this. Betsy<br />
was really in his face about come on. We're a tiny little nit. Sure<br />
we can do it. We can carry our own stuff.<br />
<br />
Shelley Adelman, whose name you probably heard today, in a sense,<br />
got his start by running these smaller shows around the country and<br />
then he built up to running PC Expo in New York and Las Vegas and<br />
then he got into you run a show in Las Vegas you've got to make<br />
deals with the hotels and so on.<br />
<br />
The earlier PC shows in Las Vegas did not use the convention<br />
center. They were held in I think probably the Hilton. He got to<br />
know hotel people there and he started buying into hotels and today<br />
Shelley Adelman is huge. Not Caesars but he owns one of the really<br />
big casino operations. He's on Forbes list of top 100 wealthiest<br />
Americans.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sure he only uses union labor.<br />
<br />
David: I'm sure he does, absolutely. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's how he got where he is.<br />
<br />
David: We've crossed paths with some interesting people in different ways.<br />
There was another one I was thinking of. Actually, this is jumping<br />
around a little bit. Editorial, in different people submitting<br />
articles and then some people I would ask would you do something<br />
for us early, early on. That's another thing we went to. I went to<br />
comic cons and the sci-fi cons to promote the magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was early.<br />
<br />
David: That was early, very early. I've got to tell you one little<br />
incident there. I also went to small press publisher conventions. I<br />
went to one over Labor Day weekend, and I don't know what year it<br />
was. It was probably '75, '76 maybe. The place that they gave this<br />
small press to exhibit was one platform up in the subway under<br />
Lincoln Center.<br />
<br />
Lincoln Center, of course, huge, but down one level is not shops.<br />
There may be a few shops but it was a big, open platform. That's<br />
where we were exhibiting. I had my magazines out there on a table<br />
and I was talking to these other underground publishers and so on,<br />
typical.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's why they put you there. It's underground.<br />
<br />
David: Underground, yes. It was a Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Saturday,<br />
Sunday, Monday. I said, "I can't be here on Sunday." Talked to the<br />
person next to me and I said, "I'm just going to leave a cigar box<br />
that says put your money in the box." He said, "You're nuts. We're<br />
in a New York subway system. You're going to come back with nothing<br />
in your box." I left a bunch of change in it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: And your ex-wife said you were too trusting.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] Yes. I left like 15 single dollar bills in there so people<br />
could make change and I just left it there, from Saturday to Monday<br />
and I came back Monday, about $40, $50 in the box. I don't know<br />
whether it paid for everything that was taken but it worked out<br />
fine. Yes, I was obviously too trusting, but at roughly the same<br />
time there was something going on. I think it was a sci-fi<br />
convention or world future society. Yeah, it was world future<br />
society convention.<br />
<br />
They had some notable people there. I was sitting down with Alvin<br />
Toffler in the lobby of the Colosseum and along comes over to us<br />
Isaac Asimov. What a wonderful little party. We had some coffee in<br />
the Colosseum and I said, "Isaac, can you write me an article?"<br />
"I got a good story from the I, Robot series that hasn't been widely<br />
used or published and you can use that." So I got an early <br />
contribution from Asimov and Alvin Toffler wrote something for us.<br />
<br />
Anyway, got to know some interesting people at that point. Then who<br />
should submit an article, and by this time Betsy was the editor...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Out of transom comes an article from Michael Creighton. It was a<br />
program. I can't remember what it was about.<br />
<br />
David: For the Apple.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was a program for the Apple, but it was something really dumb.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know if you remember, we were reminded when Harry Garland<br />
was up at the thing in Seattle. Harry Garland was one of the first<br />
ones to produce an independent manufactured a board, a S-100 bus<br />
board, for the Altair, and this was really early, and he called it<br />
the TV Dazzler. It made little squares light up but he could make<br />
lots of them light up in different colors or just a few. It was a<br />
silly program but people said, whoa, we can do graphics on this.<br />
<br />
He eventually developed it into quite an interesting graphics tool,<br />
I guess. People did buy the TV Dazzler for itself but the purpose<br />
was here's a board you could produce graphics, do some graphics.<br />
<br />
So in any event, that's essentially what Michael Creighton's program<br />
did for the Apple. Not much.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This was not early on.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, it was after the Apple 2 was out.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was probably...<br />
<br />
David: '80.<br />
<br />
Betsy: 1980, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So did you publish it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. I rejected it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: I'm like, my god, we're going to reject an article from Michael Creighton?<br />
<br />
Betsy: We both liked Michael Creighton as an author.<br />
<br />
David: Oh my gosh. But we did. We really did. We had standards.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Later on, though, he wrote something. It was better. It wasn't<br />
great, but he did write something better and we did accept it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Orson Scott Card wrote for Compute, I think. I don't know if he was<br />
Orson Scott Card yet at that point, but some flub who was writing,<br />
yeah. But who else?<br />
<br />
David: We've crossed paths with some people.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Michael Creighton was actually very nice.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, 6 foot 8, big guy. He was a very nice guy. Unfortunately, he<br />
died On the other end of things, early on, we really were...this was<br />
probably even before Betsy got in...kind of in the small press<br />
underground publishing movement as much as in the legitimate big<br />
magazines, because that's kind of where I started.<br />
<br />
Betsy: When I came, we had just published the first sleek, coated paper<br />
magazine and coated stock. In October 1978, I believe, that was<br />
published. That was the first one on coated stock. That was kind of<br />
the bridge to legitimacy.<br />
<br />
David: For the first two years, it was published on news print and I had<br />
a little tie in with some of the small press people. I was learning<br />
about publishing from small press review, and I got to know some of <br />
the people who were doing successful publishing. A lot of them were<br />
magazines and comics out of San Francisco.<br />
<br />
So I got to know a little bit... R. Crumb and Gilbert<br />
Shelton and Sherry Flannigan, and some of those early, Bobby<br />
London. So anyway, one ad we ran real early on was an adaptation of<br />
an add that Robert Crumb did. He said "Go ahead and change my thing<br />
to creative computing. Go for it." Sherry Flannigan she did a comic <br />
strip called Tronch and Bonnie, Tronch was a little dog and Bonnie<br />
was a little girl and they occasionally got mixed up with a robot dog.<br />
So I published that.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there some sort of falling out with that person?<br />
<br />
David: With Sherry? No. I'm still friends with her on Facebook. They had a<br />
major, major problem, she was involved with Gary Hallgrin and I<br />
forget who the publisher was, McNeil, Bobby London. They were the<br />
Air Pirates funniest group that Disney took to task, and really, oh<br />
my god, that caused the death of a lot of publishing in the underground<br />
comics movement.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I don't understand.<br />
<br />
David: Air Pirates were funny, they were just looking for trouble. They<br />
had Disney characters flying planes and getting into all kinds of<br />
trouble and getting into problems that Disney characters never<br />
would have done, sexual problems as well as just acting badly.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Disney just said, "We can't put up with this." It was an<br />
interesting case, because was it a copyright violation? Not really<br />
because they were character look-a-likes, but they weren't calling<br />
them Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck but they looked the same or very<br />
similar. But, it was a landmark case in the underground comics movement<br />
and it really caused a lot of them to pull back, a lot on the satire<br />
and stuff that they were publishing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I asked about Sherry because a number of years ago when I had first<br />
put the Best of Creative Computing books on my website, they were up<br />
for a while, then I got an email saying, "You have to take this content,<br />
these pages down... copyright violation", it was just like<br />
waving their arms. So I took it down but it was, I thought, maybe it<br />
was...<br />
<br />
David: Well that whole copyright trademark thing, there interpretations<br />
that go from really, really strict...everything that goes on the <br />
Internet is a public domain. Well, that is not really true either.<br />
Are you making money from copyrighted material? If you are then<br />
that's a pretty clear violation. Are you affecting the copyright<br />
owner's ability to make money with it? That's a violation.<br />
<br />
I'm kind of in this right now with Hergé and TinTin, those books<br />
have inspired a lot of people to make parodies and fake TinTin<br />
covers, you know, TinTin at the beach, you know, places TinTin<br />
wouldn't normally go. Well is it affecting the sales of TinTin books,<br />
or is it actually increasing them?<br />
<br />
Casterman, who owns, and Mulenard, own the TinTin copyrights.<br />
They are really going after some of these people, but I'm not<br />
sure that they have a really good case. So some people take<br />
everything off and want nothing on the website. And others<br />
are saying, "Hey, this is legitimate." I have collected a lot of<br />
those covers, and put them up on a website.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I guess you'll find out soon enough.<br />
<br />
David: I will find out, soon enough.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They may not be right legally, but how hard do you want to fight<br />
it.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: I think that they have to demonstrate that it's hurting them in<br />
some way. One last thing, from the question you asked yesterday,<br />
back to the money issue, where does the money go, well when I<br />
sold the magazine, right at that time I took 15 percent of what<br />
I had received, and donated it to charities. I have in a sense<br />
signed on, although not as an official signee, to the Gates-Buffet<br />
initiative to give away half of my wealth, while I am alive.<br />
<br />
At one point in time you can compute that, I have already given<br />
away more than I have received for Creative Computing to charity.<br />
Of course, it had grown a little bit and we made reasonably decent<br />
investments and it continues to grow. But, I'm really committed<br />
to doing that. My kids are not going to inherit it all. That's just<br />
the way it is, the way I believe. Put my money where my heart is.<br />
Anyway,<br />
<br />
Kevin: I have a question for you Betsy, you said something yesterday,<br />
I should follow up that one. You said something about stealing BASIC.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well there was this big thing. Just the night before last, at this<br />
dinner we went to, where all the people who were at the first MITS<br />
conference and they referred to the letter that Bill Gates wrote.<br />
<br />
Kevin: "Why are you stealing my software?"<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well exactly. That was just a reference to that Bill Gates, which<br />
had just been brought back to my memory by that. People were<br />
telling stories at this. Instead of having an after dinner speaker<br />
they were just passing the mic around and people were talking about<br />
incidents and things from the past.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you get to tell a story to this group of...?<br />
<br />
David: Not really, I just followed up on something Nolan Bushnell said.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Some of those stories were really boring.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: Oh yeah, long and boring.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Way too long.<br />
<br />
David: It's an interesting thing though, about basic itself, because, well<br />
it was developed at an educational institution originally by Kemeny<br />
and Kurtz at Dartmouth. And they, either deliberately or because they<br />
had gotten a lot of grant money from General Electric in the early time<br />
sharing systems, they basically let anybody use their Basic.<br />
<br />
So it was developed at Dartmouth but if GE, or later Ge/Honeywell,<br />
put a system in at Minnesota or Florida or someplace else. They could<br />
use Basic, they could have a no license fee or anything. That made Basic<br />
a universal language that was available, at least that version of<br />
Basic. <br />
<br />
Well then if you write a different version of Basic, where does that<br />
fall? These are some sort of violation and you need some<br />
permission. And basically Kemeny and Kurtz said, "No, you don't."<br />
<br />
[background noise due to cat]<br />
<br />
And they allowed Basic to be used and developed by others.<br />
<br />
Digital Equipment, at the same time, maybe even earlier, but<br />
roughly the same time, had developed also an interactive language<br />
called Focal. And Focal in many regards was more efficient than<br />
Basic, because they were running it on mini-computers and there was<br />
less memory to work with. On the other hand, and this was true<br />
Digital...as time went on, they said, "No, no no, nobody else can use<br />
Focal. We are not going to let, especially those people at Data General,<br />
but any place else, nobody could use Focal."<br />
<br />
I think it wound up with a situation like Sony and Betamax. Sony<br />
saying, "Betamax is ours and it is a better format that VHS," which<br />
it was, it definitely was. But then, JVC saying, "We have VHS. Ok Toshiba,<br />
hey do you want to use it? Fine, we'll license it to you for next to<br />
nothing."<br />
<br />
Kevin: You think Focal could have been Basic.<br />
<br />
David: I think it could have been very big. I think it could there could<br />
have been very serious competition between the two languages, but<br />
by Digital limiting it only to their own computers and specifically<br />
to their minicomputers, not even the big mainframes, it really<br />
limited the spread of Focal. In fact, it forced me, at DEC, to go<br />
out to the developers, and people in educational institutions they<br />
wanted Basic.<br />
<br />
There were a few schools and colleges in Boston area, near DEC that<br />
were OK with Focal. But stuff was getting published by Minnesota<br />
Educational Computer Consortium and others in Basic, and Huntington<br />
Computer Project. So they wanted Basic. [laughs] I had to<br />
go out, I hired one group, actually it turned out to be just an<br />
individual guy in Brooklyn that developed a Basic for 4K PDP-8. Well<br />
Basic took 3.5K, that gave you 500 words, 500 12 bit, not even<br />
16 bit, at least get 2 bytes per... but 500 words to write programs.<br />
Wasn't much.<br />
<br />
So that forced Lunar Lander and Hamurabi and some of those programs<br />
actually. Some of them I imported over from Focal into Basic. And<br />
then we had a machine that had 8K, we had a different version of Basic<br />
and then because Hewlett Packard had a machine that read cards, mark<br />
sense cards, we had to have a different version of basic for that.<br />
Then we had a timeshare Basic. We had six versions of Basic, five actually<br />
on the PDP-8 family. It was absurd, it was crazy, but well, we had to do it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I was going to ask you, kind of the process of like... you started<br />
saying... you interrupted yourself really, you said, "People would submit<br />
articles and then..." I don't know what you were going to say next.<br />
But it reminded me that I wanted to ask you like, kind of, just the<br />
process of how the magazine got made. You got an article was,<br />
I assume it was typed up or something and...<br />
<br />
Betsy: You mean the mechanics of the production?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We can receive most of the articles for the magazine came over the<br />
transom. And we would get these articles and our editorial assistant<br />
would log them in and pass them around to the editorial staff. John<br />
Anderson and Russ Lockwood and...<br />
<br />
David: Peter Fee.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Peter Fee.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What does that mean, over the transom?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Means they weren't solicited. Somebody in the middle of the night<br />
dumped them overboard [laughs] or through the mailbox. We put a little<br />
piece of paper on there and the guys would write their opinions.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] That is serious.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Some of the things they said. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Like what? What would they say?<br />
<br />
Betsy: "Don't quit your day job." [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: And then they had the rubber stamp.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Somebody found a stamp. Everything that we had was used, including<br />
our desk and everything. And somebody found, at the back of the<br />
desk, a stamp. It said San Marcos on it. This was like the ultimate<br />
insult. [laughs] San Marcos, like you know, "Get out of here."<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Send it to San Marcos?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Send it to San Marcos, wherever that was. Ultimately, I would make<br />
the final decision whether we were going to publish this or not.<br />
Once we were well established, the vast majority of them went back.<br />
We never returned manuscripts. And they would come with piles of<br />
code. A lot of them were programs and, then we would decide, and<br />
then it was the editorial assistants job to notify the person.<br />
Then we bought all rights, didn't we?<br />
<br />
David: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
Betsy: North American Serial rights, that's what we bought for everything.<br />
Then they would go into a queue. Sometimes we would say something,<br />
"Oh, this is going to go really well with this educational<br />
institute that we're doing in June," so slate that one for June, or<br />
just put it in the queue and we will see when it comes or rises to<br />
the top or whatever.<br />
<br />
The more technical editors like, John Anderson, he was our best guy<br />
ever... they would go through the code and make sure the code worked,<br />
and I would edit them for content and correct them.<br />
<br />
David: For English, for grammar.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, with a pen and pencil. Then they would go to our typesetter.<br />
Typesetter would correct them. And then they would come back, and I<br />
think, our lower level editorial assistant would proofread them,<br />
but proofread a lot of them too. When they came out typesetter, it<br />
was on a smooth shiny paper.<br />
<br />
David: Photographic paper.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And then, if they had screenshots or anything the art department<br />
would make them into photo stats or v-luxes. And then when it was<br />
time for them to go to press they would put them on boards, pieces<br />
of cardboard, white paper...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So like paste up?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, they do the paste up and put it on there.<br />
<br />
David: The boards were using non-reproducing blue on its photograph. They<br />
had different outlines, blue defined columns, both two and three<br />
column pages and upper limits and page numbers can go and all that kind of<br />
stuff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: We were still doing it in college newspaper in 1990.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well that's exactly it, so you know what we're talking about. And<br />
then once you get it all together and then again somebody has got<br />
to read it to make sure there is no lines left out, particularly of<br />
the programs. Make sure that those all still make sense. There were<br />
many cases where line got left out or artists cuts off the thing and<br />
realizes, "Oh, I mean to cut it shorter." and that little line<br />
disappears and then you send it off to be printed and all the<br />
subscribers get a little upset because Star Trek doesn't run.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: So that sort of thing happened infrequently, or often?<br />
<br />
David: With typeset material, not much at all. But with program listings,<br />
program listings were really tough. Because you would have people<br />
that would submit something, and they'd have a really cheap, low-<br />
end dot matrix printer. And we always encouraged people, if you're<br />
going to submit a program, submit it in some machine-readable form.<br />
We don't want to type them all in to make sure they work, even<br />
though our readers are going to have to, but we don't want to have<br />
to do that. So send us. But even so, we might then print it off on<br />
one of our slightly higher end printers. But I'll tell you what,<br />
you have page breaks and everything else. And the Art department<br />
didn't have a clue about programs and stuff. The program would get<br />
stated down. We weren't using the full sized type for program<br />
listings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. At that point we hadn't the ability to make them fit.<br />
<br />
David: That's where the most common place that you'd lose a line or<br />
something. It would get photographed, and when it's coming out of a<br />
line printer, you might have one or two lines on the following<br />
page. "Oh, we forgot that."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Personally, I know it said so much about magazine that when it<br />
continued, there were just sometimes a handwritten arrow going,<br />
"Continued over here." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Oh, absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was early.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It wasn't professional, and that was awesome. It was just like,<br />
"OK."<br />
<br />
Betsy: Then what we would do, we would request when we... we would solicit<br />
articles. Like if there was a new Apple peripheral that we wanted<br />
to review, we'd get the product. Then a lot of times, our own guys<br />
wanted to review the stuff, but if it was something that we didn't<br />
have time for, or that was better suited to one of our freelancers,<br />
we would send it out and ask for a review of it.<br />
<br />
A lot of reviews came in over the transom too, but we tried to be<br />
careful of those, that they were not either trying to justify their<br />
own purchase of whatever it was or get even with the publisher for<br />
producing it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Or written by the [ED: manufacturer]... [crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: That didn't really happen.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That really wasn't an issue at the time, it was a more innocent<br />
time. That really didn't happen much, but it was, sometimes, people<br />
would get a product they didn't care for and totally bash it, then<br />
we have to go and figure out is it really that bad. We tend to not<br />
produce seriously negative...if it was a really bad product we just<br />
ignored it.<br />
<br />
David: We tried to be objective with reviews, but before I got into the<br />
computer field at all I was in market research. There are a number<br />
of biases, too, that really overwhelmingly affect all kinds of<br />
market research, polls, or surveys. One is that people think they're<br />
better than they are. For example, if we were doing a poll or a<br />
research study, we'd put a question on basically designed to show<br />
the executives who were using this data that there were some<br />
biases.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He's not talking about Creative Computing.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: No, no, way earlier. I'm talking about Proctor and Gamble<br />
products or General Foods or that kind of thing. Anyways, the<br />
question we put on was "please rank your driving ability," and we<br />
had from well below average, accident waiting to happen up to Mario<br />
Andretti, Danica Patrick, over there. And you know what, 99 percent<br />
of the population ranked themselves better than the average. Where<br />
is your average then? Its way high.<br />
<br />
The other thing, equally pervasive in a sense, is that people<br />
wanted to justify a decision, a purchase decision. In fact, back<br />
the 30s, the slogan for Ford Motor Company was ask a man that owns<br />
one. You ask a man that owns and has made a decision to buy this<br />
car, he's going to say "Yeah, it is the greatest car." So you put<br />
on questions, again, throwaway questions.<br />
<br />
If you had this, or if you were an owner of whatever car it is that<br />
you have. "What do you have now? Would you buy another one?" People<br />
"Oh, yes. This is a great decision. I love this car." I'll tell you<br />
where you can find out, is you look at what percentage of people<br />
that did own that particular car did buy another one? They're<br />
always way lower than they those that say they would buy another<br />
one.<br />
<br />
And it gets more pronounced with higher prices. If you've made a decision<br />
to buy a high-priced car, you're going to think, "Man, I'll tell you what.<br />
This Land Rover was the best car I have ever bought." And 78 percent of<br />
people might say, "I'm going to buy another one." and you know what,<br />
about 15 percent of the people actually do.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So this gets back to the magazine because people want to justify in a<br />
review...<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. That's exactly right. And as Betsy said, it could go the<br />
other way, too. "I think I'm getting screwed here with this product<br />
and I'm going to knock it." So when you get reviews, in essence, over<br />
the transom, they're either justifying, "This was really wonderful.<br />
I made a great decision buying this particular product," or "I hate<br />
it." It's hard to know whether the review was really objective and<br />
realistic.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you ever push-back from advertisers?<br />
<br />
Betsy: All the time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Can you tell me?<br />
<br />
Betsy: We would feel the pushback from our ad sales people. They would say<br />
"So and so is annoyed with you because you didn't put it." We very<br />
rarely put anybody's totally negative reviews, but we tried to be<br />
objective, and not every product is perfect. Almost every product<br />
is going to have some negative feature.<br />
<br />
We would put those in and the advertisers would then go to their ad<br />
rep and complain. Then the ad rep would come to us and say, "Why<br />
are you doing this? These people are mad. I have to sell them ads."<br />
We would just say "Separation of church and State. You are<br />
advertising in this magazine because it's a credible magazine, and<br />
if we let you push us around, it won't be credible anymore, and<br />
then it will reflect on your ad."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you remember anyone ever pulling ads, you know...?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't, offhand. Do you?<br />
<br />
David: No, but I can tell you the opposite. There were a couple of<br />
magazines that almost ran manufactured press releases as product<br />
reviews. They did get more advertising than we did from some<br />
manufacturers that liked that. I hate to name names, but Compute<br />
magazine. I don't think you'll find any negative reviews in Compute<br />
magazine. Everything was the greatest thing since sliced bread.<br />
Personal Computing, similar, very positive "Wow, gee whiz" reviews on<br />
almost all the things that they saw. It just isn't that way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You have talked a lot about Creative and we've talked briefly<br />
at least about the other magazines. Sync, the one about Timex<br />
Sinclair. I understand the allure of publishing a magazine geared<br />
to a specific system, but why did you pick Timex Sinclair? [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Probably two reasons. One is that we had more of a presence in<br />
England than most of the other magazines.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Still do.<br />
<br />
David: We had a very early agreement with David Tebbet, who was the co-<br />
publisher of Personal Computer, something-or-other. It might have<br />
been Personal Computer World. Yes, it was.<br />
<br />
Betsy Ahi: Yes it was Personal Computer World, and when PC world started they<br />
had to call it PC World because there was already a Personal<br />
Computer World in England.<br />
<br />
David: And we had an agreement that they could reprint materials from<br />
Creative Computing, which they did for a while but then they<br />
developed their own in-house capabilities and there was enough<br />
differences. We went to England and very early on had an agent in<br />
England that we could take subscriptions.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A housewife who kept the back issues in her spare bathroom.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we still know her. Hazel Greaves, Hazy. Anyway, so we were<br />
getting enough subscriptions from England. We were sending over, I<br />
don't know how they packaged them up, but they call them Mbox, or M-<br />
bags, mail bags basically of magazines, then we remail them from<br />
England. So I had more of our connection with British market than<br />
probably any of the other magazines, well definitely did.<br />
<br />
And so I get to know Clive Sinclair and what's going on over there.<br />
And then when they bring over the computer to this country and<br />
Timex, I mean my God, big outfit. They were going to market it. By that<br />
time you know, there was no point starting a Commodore<br />
magazine or an entire magazine. They were, Or Apple, they were<br />
already existed. So maybe this is going to be the next big one. We<br />
will be right there when they start. When they were.<br />
<br />
Timex actually put, what we had simple, simple Sync or something<br />
but it was in the package with the computer. So that was one way of<br />
getting our subscriber base and we couldn't possibly afford to<br />
advertise and do direct mailings for a magazine like that. But they<br />
were, in a sense, helping us get going. So that's why. It was pretty<br />
successful actually. We were making money on that magazine<br />
mainly because we didn't have to promote it.<br />
<br />
If we had to get subscriptions, we could not have possibly made it<br />
work. There wasn't enough advertising really. I don't know what the<br />
ratio here was, but it was not as good as we would have liked it.<br />
The magazine would have been tiny if we maintained the same<br />
advertising to edit ratio we would have liked. But we didn't lose<br />
money on it but we didn't make anything on it either. I<br />
think it was a break-even proposition.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Microsystems. I'll say I don't think I know anything about it,<br />
but it was on the list.<br />
<br />
David: Microsystems... I said there was a lot of early development in<br />
New Jersey and there was a guy named Saul Libes, you will find him<br />
probably, [laughs] who was the first president of the Amateur<br />
Computer Group in New Jersey. He was a Professor at Trenton State<br />
College, and he felt that Byte magazine started out fine but then<br />
they were focusing more on assembled hardware and things that were<br />
already made.<br />
<br />
So he wanted to get down on really lower level of do it yourself,<br />
build it yourself. Microsystems was more like Byte was in the very<br />
beginning, publishing circuit diagram with logic in PC's and<br />
everything.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The first name was S-100 Microsystems.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, for the S-100 bus, then it became Microsystems in '78 or '79.<br />
When some of the others came out they started covering the 6800<br />
and 68000 chips from Motorola. But I would say it was a really<br />
techy magazine and it was one that I think, Ziff probably killed<br />
that one off.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was dead before before Ziff. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: It might have been. I don't know, but it was...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I mean, S-100 bus did not survive into the 80's.<br />
<br />
David: It was dead before as there was these eras and the do it yourself<br />
S100 era, that was '75 to '78. Then it kind of had a downward spiral<br />
of two or three years and it was gone. Well, maybe it wasn't gone<br />
but it wasn't the same. And so Microsystems was tuned into that and<br />
they were running hardcore stuff.<br />
<br />
And the reason that Saul... we reached an agreement with him to<br />
publish it, is basically he didn't have any real magazine<br />
background. We thought we could do something with it. It turned out<br />
not to be a good fit, but we published it for a while. I don't know<br />
if we made money or lost money on that. Probably it didn't make<br />
anything. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Small Business Computers, or Computing.<br />
<br />
David: What?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Small business computers? Who do we buy that from? I can't even<br />
remember. You can't even remember that we had it, I can tell by the<br />
look on your face.<br />
<br />
David: I can't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That one of my brother... my brother was the publisher remember?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I don't know who or where we got it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That just fold into Creative or...?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Eventually, but that we post it for a while. I think is something<br />
that somebody basically left on our door step.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think it was kind of like a puppy on the... [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: I think it came with your brother.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, because my brother wasn't doing publishing until after leaving<br />
college.<br />
<br />
David: It sounded like a good idea at the time, but...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think we saw a future in business computing.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we did, and unfortunately that was one Ziff Davis...<br />
I mentioned yesterday that they wanted to really shift the<br />
focus of Creative Computing away from home and broaden out and<br />
shifted into the small business market. And just did not, it was an<br />
uncomfortable fit. We would've been better to have a separate<br />
magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember where we got Small Business Computing from or<br />
where it went.<br />
<br />
David: I don't either.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But I know that obviously it wasn't a huge acquisition.<br />
<br />
David: It was a footnote.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A footnote in the story. [laughs]<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Actually, a bigger acquisition was earlier and that was ROM<br />
Magazine. ROM was published by who? (ED: not the Atari-related<br />
magazine of the early 1980s.)<br />
<br />
Betsy: Erik Sandberg-Diment.<br />
<br />
David: Right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: D-I-M-E-N-T.<br />
<br />
David: Connecticut. He did a nice job with the magazine, very nice job<br />
with it. Published nine issues and a little different focus than<br />
Creative but it really overlapped us very nicely. He had more<br />
graphic stuff and it was through him that I got to know<br />
George Baker and some of the people up there. The other guy that<br />
did the pixelated blocks photos. You've seen those.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The Einstein.<br />
<br />
David: [crosstalk] The Lincoln with block pics.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Block pics.<br />
<br />
David: Block pics. OK, he and George Baker sort of came as a package with<br />
ROM, they knew of each other. We actually, for I would say, four or<br />
five issues, ran ROM as a whole separate section and even set it on<br />
the cover of Creative Computing and ROM. And then it became evident...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think that was because he had a whole other editorial kicking<br />
around. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That we bought.<br />
<br />
David: Could be. And then we would just merge it in completely, but that<br />
was a very good fit. It brought us more editorial than it did<br />
subscribers. They did not have a big subscriber base. But it was a<br />
nice marriage in a sense.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Video and Arcade Games only published I think four issues.<br />
<br />
David: Three.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Three?<br />
<br />
David: Actually, three but if you've got a hold of the third one, you're<br />
doing well. I think Ziff cut that off after two real issues got<br />
mailed out. We did a third one but it wasn't sent out to<br />
subscribers.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My website only has two issues.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. There were only two that really were distributed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So now I have...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: A goal. [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, if you can get a hold of the third one. [laughter] I don't<br />
even have that. There's a same thing on Atarian. There were three<br />
issues of Atarian that I did not keep the third issue. Oh, man.<br />
Shoot me.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: But Video and Arcade Games, there were at least five or six other<br />
magazines focusing on that. Talk about magazines that were running<br />
non-objective manufacture-provided reviews, all the others were. I,<br />
maybe, convinced myself and some people at Ziff Davis that there was<br />
a need for really objective...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ziff? Did Ziff do that?<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Were we with Ziff when we did that?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah. That was a late one. So we said, let's...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Continue it through.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, that was definitely. Let's do it. But again...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not only that but it was going to be fun.<br />
<br />
David: It was going to be a lot of fun. [laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: So why did it fail?<br />
<br />
David: OK, again you got to look at the eras and what was happening.<br />
Arcade games then really were on the decline. Video arcades where<br />
you go in and pop a quarter in, because there was so much more<br />
capability in the home computers and the Coleco and the Mattel<br />
and the different home systems. They could do all, well,<br />
not as much, but you get a pretty darned good game that you could<br />
take home with you and not have to pop a quarter in the slot every<br />
time you play.<br />
<br />
So arcade games were kind of on the downward spiral, so that<br />
eliminated a lot of potential advertising. We weren't going to get<br />
any advertising from Namco and all of the producers of the arcade<br />
games, which was, "Hey, it is advertising along with..." And the<br />
other home producers of the games, there were four or five magazines<br />
already that they were pouring money into. They didn't really want<br />
another one.<br />
<br />
So it was advertising that or just lack of advertising that killed<br />
that off. We just couldn't get it. I think there was still a need<br />
for what we had sort of in a sense proposed to do of objectively<br />
reviewing games and secondly, we're telling people how to play<br />
them.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, it was strategies.<br />
<br />
David: Strategies. It was advertising that we just didn't have, couldn't<br />
get.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Ok, the others I have are Atari Explorer and Atarian, I think we've<br />
covered pretty well.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Military vehicles, which we talked about.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] Yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So the other magazines, Byte and Kilobaud, was it rivalry?<br />
Was it friendly competition?<br />
<br />
David: Byte, we were in bed together. Not in bed together, but we<br />
published the best of Byte. Creative Computing did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: For awhile.<br />
<br />
David: Well, just one.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. That wasn't that friendly a rivalry. It wasn't that friendly<br />
after awhile.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't friendly once they sold to McGraw Hill, and they sold<br />
early. Then everything was off. We did some joint promotions with<br />
Byte for hardware creative software. We ran the ads for each other<br />
for a short time.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's when McGraw Hill cutoff.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] In a heartbeat. No more of that.<br />
<br />
David: We felt that basically we weren't even competing for the same<br />
advertisers. Just a few, but not really. Certainly, we were not in<br />
direct competition at all with Byte. So that was just kind of all<br />
in the same place and you're going in a hardware direction, we're<br />
going on the software.<br />
<br />
When Wayne Green threw this intrigue with his wife and everything<br />
else, lost Byte Magazine. He was fit to be tied. "I'm going to kill<br />
them!" and he started Kilobyte. It wasn't killable. It was Kilobyte<br />
for I don't know how many issues.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not many.<br />
<br />
David: 1000 bytes. [laughter] and a kilobyte, it had a dual meaning there.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: That was a ferocious and very nasty. Oh, horrible rivalry. Somebody<br />
early on forced him not to use the name byte at all.<br />
<br />
Betsy: So it was byte.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: So they changed it to Kilobaud.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Which didn't mean anything.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: No.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So did you have a relationship with Wayne?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Nobody had a relationship with... [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Nobody really had a relationship. I knew him, of course. He was<br />
going his own way. Now the one area actually where we got into more<br />
competition with him than in the magazine itself, because again, he<br />
was trying to be like Byte, hardware oriented and he published 73<br />
magazines so he was basically focusing on the ham radio people, the<br />
do it yourselfers and so on. But they started a software division.<br />
It was pretty good. They had a lot of the same types of software<br />
that we did on cassette tape.<br />
In any event, we really had more of a head to head rivalry on the<br />
software than in the magazine publishing. We never really had<br />
anything to do with the magazine products or books. They also<br />
published some books but more like the magazine hardware type of<br />
thing. We weren't quite as selective, but our book publishing we<br />
did get into things that weren't in the magazine. We published<br />
books with more of a hardware orientation. We had a little broader<br />
line of books than the type of things that we had in the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I don't know if you want to open this can of worms, but you said to<br />
me in an email, "You couldn't find two people whose vision,<br />
philosophy, ethics, and view of business and life was further apart<br />
than Wayne and I." Can you elaborate on that? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was just basically unpleasant, is my take on him. I didn't know<br />
him that well but it was just sort of like he had a chip on his<br />
shoulder and was daring you to knock it off. Wouldn't you say?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You knew him before I did but by the time I arrived on the scene<br />
that was just sort of the general industry perception of him, I<br />
think. It was just stay away from him, leave him alone, he's not<br />
very nice.<br />
<br />
David: Well, one other thing, which we sort of touched on a couple of<br />
times, I'm very trusting. [laughter] Overly so, according to my ex-<br />
wife and I think there would be a couple of examples. Wayne would<br />
walk out of that door, boy, out of sight, 'you're going to do<br />
something to screw him' is what his view would be. He did not trust<br />
anybody.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] And least of all, his ex wife.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: It's the old saying, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean<br />
that somebody isn't out to get you." He thought everyone was out to<br />
get him, everybody. So we were totally philosophically different.<br />
Our ways of doing business were different. I shake hands with you,<br />
we have an agreement. You don't shake hands with Wayne.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't think his employees were ever happy either.<br />
<br />
David: Oh!<br />
<br />
Betsy: You talked to them and it shows. He didn't have like a great...<br />
<br />
David: Rapport.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well it was not. The culture of his organization I don't think was<br />
particularly, I think it was probably permeated with this lack of<br />
trust.<br />
<br />
David: Well, one thing, we had fun. We really did have fun at Creative<br />
Computing. Perhaps some of the editorial staff, too much. There was<br />
one point where Betsy had to away their...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well they were all young guys. Some of them even still in high<br />
school, they would play games for hours and hours and hours, long<br />
after the reviews were done. It was one, self-contained thing that<br />
played football, and they played it for hours. I had to take it<br />
away from them. Like "don't make me be your mother"<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there any drug culture at all? If you read [inaudible 01:22:17]<br />
and he was cocaine and high everyday and popped...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not that we knew of. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: The East coast was quite different.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No there was nothing, really. I don't think so. In fact, my client<br />
John Anderson and Peter Fee, they were actually kind of protective<br />
of me in a lot of ways. I can remember being in John's office and<br />
they were talking about a movie or something like that. John said,<br />
"No, you wouldn't like this movie, don't go to this movie." That<br />
kind of thing, they were funny guys. They just kept laughing. David<br />
Lubar. They were free spirits but they were very funny, talented<br />
guys.<br />
<br />
David: He is coming out with a line of children's books, weird, weird<br />
stuff. The last one, something about the lawn mower weenies. He has<br />
a line of 6 or 8, and they're all little short stories. Some of<br />
them were adaptations of stuff that almost got published in<br />
Creative Computing, probably some of them did. Lubar is a funny<br />
guy. When he left and went to work for one of the video gaming<br />
companies, his first big successful game was "Worm Wars." You were<br />
like, "Worm Wars?" [laughs]<br />
Other people are fighting real serious warrior and you are fighting<br />
with worms. We just had a different kind of culture, a lot of fun.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Jonny Anderson went to work for A+ in San Francisco. He was one<br />
of the five people killed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1986.<br />
He was in a car and a piece of the building fell on the car. He was<br />
a really funny guy.<br />
<br />
David: We did not have a serious business culture.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, we had this great big room with a bunch of tables set up around<br />
the edges, in the middle. It was kind of like that, nowhere near as<br />
neat.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I will clean that up for you.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] Just tangles of wires, and we had to have one of every<br />
kind of computer so we can test all the software, and this one<br />
would be running this kind of peripheral, and it was like a young<br />
guys dream job.<br />
<br />
David: You commented yesterday about how we had a bunch of high school,<br />
not quite, but still...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I said that they were in their early 20s but they basically had the<br />
maturity of high school students, they needed a little bit of<br />
mothering. But I wasn't that myself. They were just really nice<br />
guys, we did a good job hiring those kids.<br />
<br />
David: When you talk about the Atari cultures and some of the others,<br />
where every Friday some of these companies have parties, that kind<br />
of thing. We had an annual party, a picnic. We didn't need weekly<br />
parties and stuff to let you have fun because that stuff was going<br />
on every day, not really partying but playing the games and<br />
bantering and everything else.<br />
As they say, at Washington, a real efficient business culture.<br />
Heck, I didn't work for Digital Equipment, which was still a pretty<br />
relaxed place, but AT&T which was anything but. This is as far away<br />
from that kind of corporate culture as you can get, but it worked.<br />
Didn't make a lot of money, but it worked.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:26:58]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. And I think they appreciated it because they weren't making<br />
tons of money either, but they were having a lot of fun. They<br />
enjoyed going to work, they really enjoyed it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Speaking of Kindle, I've done it but haven't told anybody yet that<br />
best of Creative Computing too is now available on Kindle. And I<br />
have been working backwards. [crosstalk] I just had it on sale.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I haven't publicized it yet for sale.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They won't let you do. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah, I think they will have two.<br />
<br />
David: Did you do that through Amazon? How do you convert is to Kindle?<br />
I scan them and then I do CRM and I use Elance or utilize some<br />
service in India that converts it back to ASCII, and then they<br />
convert it into an E-book from there. It's a lot of work, I want it<br />
done well, and I want it to be super awesome. And they just<br />
[inaudible 01:28:40] , like we were talking about before.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Outsourcing and stuff. But I can do it myself but that would take<br />
way too long. So I just try to do the quality control [inaudible<br />
01:28:49] . It's not perfect but better than nothing.<br />
<br />
David: I have reached the point where with my Dodge restoration book, that<br />
yes, many of the borders around the pictures are terrible, they're<br />
hand drawn and so on. But I'm not going to bother to re-do that, I<br />
just want take the book, get it into some sort of machine readable<br />
format, PDF or something. [inaudible 01:29:24] somebody that can...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah, I can get you off with that. We can then figure it out.<br />
<br />
David: I found one extra one that I can cut up.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That will help a lot. [inaudible 01:29:37] . If you want to sell a<br />
PDF of it, that would be up in couple of day. That's easy, but a<br />
searchable Kindle version that takes longer.<br />
<br />
David: I don't want a Kindle version because people want to print out<br />
something that they can...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Take out to the garage<br />
<br />
David: When people slide under the vehicle they have it there, "Oh, OK<br />
this is what I should be looking for."<br />
<br />
Kevin: If you scan it and upload it to Amazon, even create space from<br />
[inaudible 01:30:06] company, then there could actually be another<br />
book, that looks pretty identical to the first one. We will figure<br />
out.<br />
Do you [inaudible 01:30:23] ? But are you familiar with...?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Are there any?<br />
<br />
Kevin: There are but they are very different than Creative.<br />
<br />
David: Somebody out there said, "What did you read today?" The only<br />
magazines that I will occasionally pick up in the computer field<br />
are mostly from England, Internet magazines, well there are<br />
several, which is sort of interesting that the dominant Internet<br />
magazines come from England, but they do.<br />
If I want to do something, and I haven't lately, but I wanted to<br />
get into doing something different or interactive or something with<br />
my website. I'd pick up one of those magazines and kind of have<br />
same kind of thing that Creative used to publish. Here is a code to<br />
do it in Pearl or HTML, whatever.<br />
<br />
I converted all of my website, quite a while ago, to XHTML from old<br />
HTML. I did not like any of the programs that generate web pages,<br />
mainly because...Well, today its probably OK, but I felt that<br />
earlier on, they were very inefficient. You'd have this much code<br />
for something and XHTML would write it in five lines.<br />
<br />
My old-fashioned [inaudible 01:32:23] said, "You know what, the<br />
interpreter or compiler or whatever, has to go through a lot of<br />
that just to pick out what is going to be displayed." My web pages<br />
are very compact and short. They are all XHTML, none of that is<br />
extra [inaudible 01:32:41] style pages and everything else.<br />
<br />
Anyway, so that's what I'll pick up a magazine for. I'm was doing a<br />
little bit of programming in Pearl and then I said, "No. You know<br />
what, I can get routines that I can download and I don't have to<br />
learn it myself. I learned enough to know that I don't want your<br />
Pearl program." [laughs] Or what is the other one? I don't know.<br />
I'm right at the point now where I'm wanting to do some more things<br />
that I can't, so I'll probably purchase some more computer<br />
magazines and learn about it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Has anyone talked to you about the purchase of PC by Davis?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is a big story.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: She was involved.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was involved. There was a magazine called PC. I was in San<br />
Francisco.<br />
<br />
Kevin: PC magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: PC Magazine, right. And, there was a guy named Tony Gold and there<br />
was somebody else that I can't remember. There was Tony Gold and<br />
this Mr. X started this magazine and they hired...David Banell will<br />
probably tell you all, I don't know all the details but I'm sure he<br />
has it engraved in his brain.<br />
They hired David Banell to run it and I guess several other people,<br />
and my understanding is, that they told them they were going to<br />
give them a piece of the action, they weren't going to pay them<br />
very much but you're all part owners and everything, but nobody<br />
ever wrote it down.<br />
<br />
So when Ziff Davis approached Tony Gold and Mr. X and wanted to buy<br />
the magazine, and the guys said, "Oh yeah, sure," and they sold it<br />
to him and all these people that were working for them said, "Well,<br />
what about us. We're part owners too." But there was no proof of<br />
it. So Ziff bought it, and they were right in the middle, just<br />
about to go to press with an issue and they got word that it had<br />
been purchased by Ziff.<br />
<br />
So David Banell took just about the entire staff and they walked<br />
out and went across town and started PC World. Apparently their<br />
lawyers said, "Don't take anything with you." So they just walked<br />
out and left the offices as they were, and Ziff, who now had a<br />
magazine to get out and no one to do it, sent me out to San<br />
Francisco for a couple of weeks and there was like an editorial<br />
assistant and a couple of freelance writers, were the only people<br />
left.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So this is when you became the interim.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is how I become the editorial director of PC. So I basically<br />
went out there and walked into this office and had to pull together<br />
their issue and get it off to the printer. They had a big dummy on<br />
the wall where everthing...<br />
<br />
Kevin: They lay all the...<br />
<br />
Betsy: They lay all the impositions where all the pages and the stories<br />
were going to go and they moved everything around. [laughs] But<br />
they couldn't resist.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That is awesome.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This one guy, whose name I wish I could remember. Barry Owen,<br />
worked with me, and we were able to get it off to the printer and<br />
then pack everything up and send it back to New York and then they<br />
hired Barry Owen, he moved to New York and he eventually become the<br />
editor, because that was who they had.<br />
I was sort of the editorial director for a while and they said<br />
that, "If you were going to do this, you would have to come to the<br />
city. We are going to really set up an office here and make it<br />
real." And I said, "No, I am not going to drive into the city every<br />
day or take the train or the bus or anything." It was a interesting<br />
story and we were getting much more interesting version of it from<br />
David Barnell, who was there. [laughs]<br />
<br />
And in the mean time, they were all starting up PC World and taking<br />
all of their freelancers and trying to make it as difficult as<br />
possible for PC. That was a big rivalry, obviously.<br />
<br />
David: And then it created a couple of months of problems at creative too,<br />
because my editor was gone. I had really gotten very dependent to<br />
rely on her for so many things. "I got to edit this myself." And<br />
then the whole question mark was, OK if PC magazine, is she can<br />
stay with it. It was a time of uncertainty.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm sure it was a bad career move.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. But PC magazine still exist.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, exactly. I don't know if I would have existed if I had to<br />
commute to New York, that's a nasty commute. Millions of people do<br />
it but, I just didn't want to be one of them. I didn't mean to<br />
interrupt, so back to you.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What are you most proud of, or everything you have done?<br />
<br />
David: OK, that's obviously not a one word answer. Proud is, I am not<br />
crazy about it. I guess the fact that I continued to hear from<br />
people that said, "Hey, I got my start in computing from Basic<br />
computer games or Creative Computing," or something that I had my<br />
hand in, that makes me feel pretty good.<br />
You have a long term, or longer term influence that just what you<br />
do at the time, it's living on. It's not living on forever. Basic<br />
isn't going to live on forever. But I think the idea that having<br />
some positive influence on other people, on their lives, on their<br />
careers, that's a good.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You helped send people into the computer science field.<br />
<br />
David: And you know the specific individual accomplishments. Yeah, I wrote<br />
a couple of programs that are probably in some cases, maybe not the<br />
program but the routines, are still in use. That's minor compared<br />
to having an influence on people and their career and their<br />
outlook, their future. That's way more important. "OK so I wrote a<br />
great algorithm, so what."<br />
<br />
Kevin: And you really think it's the same algorithm that's being used in<br />
Google maps and...<br />
<br />
David: Portions of it, yeah. But that is minor. I look back and I say,<br />
"Almost anything that I wrote in the last 30-40 years, if I were<br />
doing it today, I would have done it a little differently, but I<br />
didn't know then what I know now." So there's no one thing I could<br />
say, "Oh, that was a really great article, or great insight," or<br />
something. Anything can be improved upon.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sure. That's what disappoints me about computer magazines today is<br />
I don't think that it seems like children going to be able to go.<br />
It's not going to motivate anybody to do anything, other than use<br />
Word version 18 or whatever. There's no Basic programs to type<br />
anymore and it's not exciting.<br />
[cross talk]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Well, [inaudible 01:42:31] was mentioning that at breakfast,<br />
oh gosh that was just yesterday.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was yesterday [laughs] .<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] That kids today don't have any feeling about, or I should<br />
say knowledge about the real basics of bits. What is a bit?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: Nobody knows anymore. He wanted to find some little simple piece of<br />
hardware. Really, I guess he has, that every kid when they're in<br />
the 5th or 6th grade will be exposed to this so they'll have some<br />
concept of what bits are all about. Are you ever going to get that<br />
into schools today? No. So anyway, it's just kind of, hopefully<br />
there's been some long term influence.<br />
And what I'm doing now even, which is mainly developing bible<br />
studies for...well, I mostly have guys that have had a drug or<br />
alcohol addiction problem coming to this. They're in a rescue<br />
mission. I'm hoping that these studies can have a little bit of an<br />
influence on the direction of their lives. They're a positive<br />
influence on where they go from here. So it's kind of, people more<br />
than a specific thing or whatever.<br />
<br />
[pause]<br />
<br />
Those are terrible copies.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They are copies. These are from the scans. I was printing scans and<br />
I wasn't trying to make them pretty. Just for my reasons, it was<br />
quick and dirty. I could've bumped the contrast and stuff.<br />
<br />
David: There's Carl.<br />
[pause]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do have anything left, like how many subscribers you had over time?<br />
Is that data around anymore? How many newsstand copies you had? I<br />
assume that is a lot.<br />
<br />
David: OK, maximum, I think we mentioned that. We hit just about a half a<br />
million before Ziff killed it. Then, they gave people a choice of<br />
three magazines that they expected to continue to publish, PC,<br />
Apple's A+, or Mac User.<br />
I'm guessing that most people went with PC. One of the reasons<br />
actually was Ziff's rationale at that point was, PC World had<br />
really grown a lot and the circulation base of PC World and PC were<br />
very close. They were both about a half million. PC might have had<br />
a small lead.<br />
<br />
Then, by killing Creative Computing and rolling all of those<br />
subscribers, there was some overlap. Certainly, there were some<br />
subscribers that got both magazines. You probably had a quarter of<br />
a million additional subscribers into PC. All of the sudden, they<br />
go to advertise, "We've got three-quarters of a million and PC<br />
World only has half a million."<br />
<br />
That was when PC had a huge growth spurt. You know, they started<br />
publishing those telephone-book-thick issues.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I would think that it probably still holds the record for the<br />
largest magazine ever published, whenever the issue was that they<br />
published it, it was their biggest one. Certainly magazines aren't<br />
getting bigger now. They didn't continue to increase in size after<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: Then they started publishing it twice a month. The nudge that the<br />
subscriber base at Creative, gave to PC really, separated them<br />
completely from PC World. They had their reasons.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. This is a chart of the page count of Creative Computing over<br />
its life. It's not a question, I just made a chart. Every December<br />
there's a peak for the big December issue. Right at the end it<br />
just, all of the sudden, stopped.<br />
<br />
David: Well, that's when Ziff had decided to kill it, which was almost a<br />
year before. They basically let us publish for another eight or<br />
nine months after they had made the decision.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was a lot of back and forth. Are they going to kill it? Are<br />
they not going to kill it?<br />
<br />
David: They weren't promoting, no subscription promotion. They were saving<br />
their money. If you don't promote the subscriptions, you're not<br />
going to get them.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is page count.<br />
<br />
David: It was advertising.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:48:59]<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't actually subscriber base didn't drop them. That's cool.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just thought I'd do a comparison, even though that's not really<br />
what I'm doing here. In the beginning, you guys were bimonthly and<br />
they were monthly. I couldn't know how to do it accurately. Their<br />
page count's actually higher, because they were doing twice as<br />
much. I don't have all the data here. You guys tended to publish<br />
larger issues than "Kilobyte?"<br />
<br />
David: It was so dependent upon advertising. You got some magazines, they<br />
would run 80, 90 percent advertising, if they could. In some<br />
special interest fields, you can get away with that, because people<br />
are actually buying the magazine for the advertising, not for the<br />
editorial content.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [inaudible 01:50:02] , a good example.<br />
<br />
David: That's exactly right. Even what the guys that bought Military<br />
Vehicles, they just went over so heavily to...I always believe that<br />
you should have at least one-third editorial content, preferably<br />
more. They dropped down to 20 percent to edit.<br />
<br />
Kevin: There was one issue, the 10th anniversary issue, I don't mean to be<br />
picking on Wayne here. There was this quote he happened to say,<br />
which I thought was really interesting to me, I wanted to get your<br />
take on it. He said, this is in 1984, "A computer system doesn't<br />
really stand a prayer anymore unless there's at least one<br />
dedicated, independent magazine for its users."<br />
<br />
David: Wayne said that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wayne said that. Is that true? At the time, would you have agreed<br />
with that?<br />
<br />
David: In '84? Again, you've got to look at where we were in the cycle at<br />
that point. The cycle was then, there were more computers dying off<br />
than there were new ones being released. Standardization had come<br />
in really. You've got the IBM PC, and everybody's producing a PC<br />
clone. Apple kept going, and Atari, and Commodore attempted to.<br />
If you were to start a computer company at that point, with a new<br />
computer, yeah, you'd need something to give your user base<br />
something to do with it, more than just what the manufacturer was<br />
selling. So, that's probably accurate. What do you think?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, I think it's accurate. That's what people started to expect.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. Another chord of the same issue which we've kind of touched<br />
on from Tom Dwyer. This is in 1984. He's saying, "Computer<br />
magazines used to have personality [laughter] and now they don't."<br />
Now, they really don't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They really don't!<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think they still have personality in form but now it's just<br />
inconsistent.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Who was Tom Dwyer? I don't remember him.<br />
<br />
David: Tom Dwyer? He was at University of Pittsburgh. He came up with all<br />
those neat applications. He and Margo...He had the best basic<br />
primer of anybody, in fact the only one that both Kemeny and Kurtz<br />
endorsed outside of their own material. He had really written some<br />
good Basic books.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm just finishing up here. The Internet says you were born in<br />
1939. Is that right?<br />
<br />
David: Yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Where were you born?<br />
<br />
David: New York, New York.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent.<br />
<br />
David: I was born in the hospital that my father had a hand in designing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Really?<br />
<br />
David: He was an architect up until the Recession. I think he, perhaps,<br />
designed the restrooms but he wasn't the...<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: When were you two married?<br />
<br />
Betsy: 1988. 25 years ago.<br />
<br />
David: June 18, 1988.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What's your last name now?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mine?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ahl.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I tried keeping this professional thing and it was just way too<br />
confusing, since that really wasn't my name anyway. That was my<br />
first husband's name, and then just...this is way too complicated.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My wife kept her maiden name and now she wishes she hadn't. It's<br />
just confusing. It just made sense to do.<br />
<br />
Betsy: If had been my maiden name, I might have, but it really wasn't.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What haven't I asked you that I should have?<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] We kind of were noodling it around last night and said,<br />
"Man, the guy's thorough."<br />
<br />
Betsy: You the most prepared interviewer ever.<br />
<br />
David: I jotted down a couple of notes. Nope.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Got everything?<br />
<br />
David: What's your thinking? Because originally you were talking to me<br />
about covering Wayne's magazines and so on.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My original thought, when I had put no thought into it, was that it<br />
would be half about Wayne's magazine and half about Creative. First<br />
of all, after talking to him, I thought there's not enough to do<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: Did you talk to Wayne?<br />
<br />
Kevin: I talked to Wayne.<br />
<br />
David: Well that's good to know, right? Carl Helmers didn't know if Wayne<br />
was still alive.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He's still alive.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's true. We asked Carl Helmers if Wayne was still alive and he<br />
was [inaudible 01:56:06] .<br />
<br />
David: Actually, there was another guy up there that published a computer<br />
magazine. What the heck was the name of it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Who are you talking about?<br />
<br />
David: Up in New Hampshire, Peterborough. It was one of the earlier would-<br />
be competitors to Datamation. So, it was much earlier.<br />
He was absolutely totally convinced about the Kennedy assassination<br />
and published a computer analysis of all the photos and everything<br />
else. Every single issue of the magazine had this stuff. He and<br />
Wayne were on the same wavelength on that. You ask Wayne about the<br />
conspiracy. [laughs] You'll get an earful.<br />
<br />
Kevin: In answer to your question. First, it was going to be the two, and<br />
then that happened. Also my wife said, "If you're doing two, then<br />
it's going to seem like a compare and contrast thing." That's not<br />
what I want to do.<br />
Now I'm thinking that this will be a project about the earliest<br />
computer magazines, the first computer magazines. That way, I can,<br />
whatever, four or five chapters. One on Creative, and maybe Byte.<br />
I'm meeting with the editor of Byte in a couple of weeks at an<br />
event, maybe Interface Age or one of the other ones.<br />
<br />
David: If you can find Bob Jones, that would be an interesting contrast.<br />
He was Interface Age. He had a different perspective on a lot of<br />
things, and I had a lot of respect for him. He just didn't sell at<br />
the right time. Too bad. Bob Jones was a very serious, good guy.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Who were the other early people? Dr. Dobbs? I don't know what...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, Dr. Dobbs...<br />
<br />
David: Jim Warren! Oh my goodness. That would give you another perspective<br />
altogether.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's, again, the California...<br />
<br />
David: Jim Warren and Bob Albrecht are tied together very closely. They're<br />
both in sort of in the alternative lifestyle. I don't know what<br />
you'd call it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That probably had Friday afternoon pot parties. [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Oh, boy. Did they ever! Yes, yes. Jim also was the one that started<br />
the West Coast computer fairs. He's a very capable guy. Dr. Dobb's<br />
journal was in a sense, well, you've probably seen it. You have,<br />
right? OK, so you know.<br />
That's really low level programming rather than higher languages.<br />
We're talking about machine languages, assembly language,<br />
programming, and there. It was sort of like Microsystems was to<br />
Byte. Microsystems, for the really serious hardware guy. Dr. Dobbs<br />
was for the really serious programmer, compared to Creative which<br />
was for people who just wanted to type something in that would<br />
work.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:59:35] basic right. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Dr. Dobbs. That was a totally different [inaudible 01:59:43]<br />
competitor.<br />
<br />
David: We didn't compete at all. I had a view that we competed at all with<br />
them; they may have thought we did but I didn't think so.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did they even have advertising?<br />
<br />
David: Oh yeah, actually they did, and it kept going for a long time<br />
because it was a small little nitch magazine. But, yeah, Jim Warren<br />
would be an interesting guy, very interesting guy early on. I don't<br />
know about Albert because you say he published more tabloid<br />
newspapers. I don't know if they ever really published any magazine<br />
size thing or not. Probably not, but it would give me a totally<br />
different perspective because they are coming from the west coast,<br />
looser or whatever.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That sounded pretty loose.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah nothing compared to that.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think he was sort of in rebellion when he started working at<br />
Creative Computing because he was coming off of AT&T where he had to<br />
wear a suit to work every day. So the first thing he did was burn<br />
his suits and wear t-shirt and jeans way before anybody was doing<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: I went extremely in the other direction, yeah I did, but who else<br />
real early. Personal computing which I think David Barnell somehow<br />
involved in it at some point in there. Because they moved from the<br />
west coast to New Jersey, they were bought by...who was that? It<br />
was mostly a company that published things like hardware age and<br />
advertiser-driven magazines. What was the name?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, gosh. Begins with an 'H'.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Halshep<br />
<br />
David: No. Anyway, when they brought personal computing...I think Barnell<br />
maybe even started it, and then they moved it to New Jersey, and<br />
then David said "I'm not going to New Jersey. I'm a west coast<br />
guy," or whatever. And then, they changed the whole thing totally.<br />
That's why I said they're one of the ones where they were so<br />
totally advertiser driven. A press release is a product review, as<br />
far as they were concerned.<br />
They had some interesting stuff. They were a competitor only in<br />
name, but also because they got the advertising. "I think I'm going<br />
to advertise." "Oh! We're going to publish a wonderful review! Give<br />
it to us." And so they were early, and they made money. There were<br />
a bunch of flash-in-the-pan magazines that lasted 2 or 3 or maybe 6<br />
issues, but nobody...<br />
<br />
Kevin: But only one in seven made it, so...<br />
<br />
Betsy: One in seven, right?<br />
<br />
David: That's right, exactly. I can't remember the name of some of these<br />
ones, but there was a very successful big magazine that published<br />
all Apple...reviews of Apple stuff. What was that one? Apple by<br />
themselves spawned I'd guess half a dozen magazines.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Inquest, and Insider, and Apple...a bunch of others there.<br />
<br />
David: Right. Actually, there's one that I can't think of the name of, it<br />
turned out, it was bigger and thicker and creative. They were<br />
publishing a lot of stuff, but again, it would all be positive and<br />
so they really killed us on getting advertising. We had been a<br />
publisher of Apple material for a while. Then all these others came<br />
along. That one, whatever it was, was really took a lot of<br />
advertising from us. I'll think about it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You'll remember.<br />
<br />
David: I'll remember some of this. When it all settled out, you came back<br />
down to eight or nine, but the ones we're talking about...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Well, at one point there was 200.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I think that's correct.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You are probably counting newsletters..<br />
<br />
Kevin: Probably industry-specific stuff and niche stuff but still, you<br />
went from one to 200, 10 years ago.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. That's true.</div>Mauryhttps://www.computingpioneers.com/index.php?title=Dave_Ahl_and_Betsy_Ahl&diff=181Dave Ahl and Betsy Ahl2021-08-19T15:59:27Z<p>Maury: fixing inaudible sections</p>
<hr />
<div>This is a transcript of an audio interview. This transcript may contain errors - if you're using this material for research, etc. please verify with the original recorded interview.<br />
<br />
Source: ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast<br />
<br />
Source URL: http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-280-david-and-betsy-ahl-creative-computing-magazine<br />
<br />
Interviewer: Kevin Savetz<br />
<br />
Date: 3/4 April 2013<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm interested in how you guys got together. Was it some sort of<br />
office romance? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It started before then. I was working at Drew University and I was<br />
dating the computer science professor. He invited Dave...he was a<br />
subscriber to Creative Computing. I can remember being at his house<br />
and picking up a copy of this magazine and thinking, "Creative<br />
Computing," and laughing. "What kind of a title is that?"<br />
He invited Dave to come speak to one of his classes. While he was<br />
there, he said, "I should stop by your placement office. We're<br />
starting to expand. I'm looking for some people." Right? Am I<br />
getting this right? I was looking for other opportunities, so I<br />
sent him my resume. Many months later, he hired me.<br />
<br />
David: She still smarts about that.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: I interviewed her in, I don't know, April or so.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You interviewed me on April 17th and you did not hire me until<br />
August 1st. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: A lot was going on that year. That was '78.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was a really long time after that that we got married. We didn't<br />
get married until 10 years later.<br />
<br />
David: Actually, I had hired Betsy as our business manager. That's what I<br />
really needed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Not a wife, then.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not wife then, either.<br />
<br />
David: Not at that point. We had 2 buildings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had one.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, well I was looking for...<br />
<br />
Betsy: My first job was to find another building.<br />
<br />
David: We were expanding like crazy. In fact, one of the reasons that I<br />
didn't hire her sooner, I had just left my day job at AT&T, and was<br />
facing up to, "Oh my gosh, can I afford to take a salary out of<br />
Creative Computing?" Yes, we had expanded a lot, but can I even pay<br />
myself, much less other senior people? I left AT&T in July, and<br />
finally by August it became clear I really have to get this<br />
administration end of things under control.<br />
The editorial was OK. I had enough outside contributors that were<br />
going along with what we were doing in-house that I could continue<br />
with that, but it was the other end of things where we really had<br />
some problems. So then we go to 2 separate facilities. One was a 2<br />
family house on the other side of Morristown, and the other was a<br />
converted greenhouse garage, which is where I started. So, Betsy<br />
was in the greenhouse garage where I had the administration side of<br />
things, and I was at the house and that was the editorial and art<br />
and...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Software.<br />
<br />
David: ...putting the magazine together. Software, right. So she would<br />
come over from her place to my office every day or two just to let<br />
me know what's going on, and we'd get together. But it wasn't until<br />
I don't' remember the date when Betsy was saying, "Well, I'd like<br />
to get into..."<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well I had spent all my summers in college and two thereafter<br />
working at our local newspaper, writing editing and putting the<br />
whole thing together, so I think I more or less just said, "We've<br />
got all these new product announcements that we don't have anybody<br />
to do, why don't I just do them?" So, I started out doing the press<br />
releases and things.<br />
<br />
David: Her newspaper experience was first in high school covering sports.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, I started out covering the unpopular sports as a senior in<br />
high school. Because they didn't want a girl to write about the<br />
important sports. So they let the girl write about the unimportant<br />
sports, which turned out to be the winning sports, at this small<br />
New Jersey high school. That's how I started.<br />
<br />
David: And then at the newspaper, you started by writing obituaries,<br />
right?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well, it's one of the things I did. I always wanted to be a Spanish<br />
teacher. I didn't know anything about this. So, I got this sports-<br />
writing job by way of a babysitting job, I babysat for the<br />
publisher's kids and on the way home one night he said to me, "We<br />
always have a boy from the school who writes about the sports for<br />
the paper, do you know anybody?" and I said, "Well, I know the guy<br />
who did it last year, and if he could do it, I could do it."<br />
So I did that and didn't' think much more of it. Went off to<br />
college, came back over spring break, and ran into the guy in the<br />
grocery store and he said, "Would you like a job working for the<br />
paper this summer?" And I said sure. I had no idea whether he<br />
wanted me to sweep the floors or what, but it was a job so I took<br />
it. It was in the editorial department.<br />
<br />
And I learned from some very serious journalists who had worked for<br />
a very good paper, the Newark Evening News, which was a very<br />
serious paper that probably was too serious and folded, probably in<br />
the mid '60s, but these people were really good journalists and<br />
they taught me a lot.<br />
<br />
I think it was that first year, about halfway through the summer<br />
the publisher was on vacation, the editor was going to go on<br />
vacation when the publisher came back and the publisher, the day he<br />
was supposed to come back had appendicitis, had to have an<br />
appendectomy which back in those days was a much bigger deal than<br />
it is now. The editor said, "Well, I'm leaving." [laughs] And there<br />
I was. I was running this little paper.<br />
<br />
David: So I figured if you can run a newspaper, even though it's just a<br />
summer job, she could do a lot for us. Well, Betsy continued to<br />
handle the administrative things for really quite awhile and, as<br />
she said, probably was initially doing new product releases. Cause<br />
you get just tons of it over the transom and from these smaller<br />
companies...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So you'd like get a press release and then you'd rewrite it, that<br />
sort of things?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well we had a new product section and it was a format, a style for<br />
them, for each one. If they sent a photo, do a photo, a cut line<br />
for it. Basically what I do is let them pile up and then sort<br />
through and figure out which ones were worthy of attention. And<br />
then it was kind of just filler. They ran in one column and when<br />
you came to the end of the magazine whatever you had leftover you<br />
would fill in with these.<br />
<br />
David: And the thing is that the companies that were putting out these<br />
press releases, this was back in the, what '76, '77 or so, tiny<br />
little companies. They had no marketing expertise so they were<br />
sending us, in some cases, not quite handwritten but pretty crude.<br />
So it took some editing and some real work to make them readable.<br />
And then, as Betsy said, you had to guess. OK, which one, this is a<br />
significant product but is this guy going to be able to make this<br />
company go or is it just going to flop? And we tried to be<br />
responsible to the readers. Reporting on things that weren't just a<br />
wonderful great new idea but something that they were going to have<br />
on the market that was going to get some support and everything<br />
else. So anyway. That was a long story of how we got together.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I still don't know how you got together.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We were working in an office about as large as this banquette here<br />
together. Because when we first started working together we didn't<br />
have this other house. So it was the two of us. You had an actual<br />
desk I believe. I had a table that he had made out of particle<br />
board. Yeah it was fancy and I had to put duct tape along it<br />
because the edge was making holes in my clothes.<br />
So we worked in this office back to back, sort of got to know each<br />
other, and became friends, little by little. He said to me, when<br />
you're looking for this building, it would be a good thing if there<br />
was a place for me to live because I'm in the process of getting<br />
separated from my wife. Which it turned out you didn't do right<br />
away but eventually you did. Right?<br />
<br />
David: Well, it was three months later. That was right away in a sense.<br />
What precipitated that was we had a woman that was working in the<br />
mailroom and she got in cahoots with somebody in the accounting<br />
department and they started working a little embezzlement.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was this at D.E.C. or at...<br />
<br />
David: Pardon?<br />
<br />
Kevin: at DEC or...<br />
<br />
Betsy: At Creative Computing.<br />
<br />
David: No, at Creative Computing. This was just after Betsy was hired. In<br />
fact, they had it going on before and I mean they were very good at<br />
it. What they did is they set up a bank account in the name of<br />
Creative Computing in the next county. And they would take very<br />
fourth or fifth check and it might be a subscription, it might be<br />
paying for an ad or something...<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was mostly the advertisers.<br />
<br />
David: Well it was both. And then they put that into their bank account.<br />
And then the one that was in the accounting department would mark<br />
the thing as paid.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, she didn't. That was her mistake.<br />
<br />
David: Well, she didn't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because that wasn't her job.<br />
<br />
David: Well she blew one. In any event it was my advertising manager that<br />
we had sent an overdue notice to one of the advertisers.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Apple.<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Apple. It was Regis McKenna, it was Apple's agency.<br />
<br />
David: And they said, we paid that. And a woman said, well send me proof.<br />
And they did. And we looked at the bank where it was deposited and<br />
then we called in local detective, police department. And they got<br />
the bank records and said, "How much do you think this was?" Well<br />
no they didn't say that, they said, this is probably a lot more<br />
than you thought.<br />
And it turned out to be well over $100,000. And our total annual,<br />
not even profit at that point...well, the gross was just about a<br />
million at that point, not quite, but close to it. So $100,000 was<br />
a big, big chunk 10 percent.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When was this?<br />
<br />
David: '78. And, so, obviously we fired these two. And then the court<br />
finally, well they determined that they had also, one of them had been<br />
involved in welfare fraud and other stuff and the court ordered<br />
them to pay it back at the rate of, I don't know...<br />
<br />
Betsy: 47 cents a week.<br />
<br />
David: It was some tiny amount.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Still paying you... [laughter and crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Course they'll never pay anything.<br />
<br />
David: And we got one payment you know, and that was it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And she was ordered to do public service. Like who wants someone<br />
doing public service for them who's done something like that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Magazines back then, probably any business but, they were a hotbed<br />
of intrigue. You had that happened and then the whole Bike Magazine<br />
getting stolen.<br />
<br />
David: So Betsy actually, in response to that brought, in response to the<br />
embezzlement brought in her Sister-in-Law Bobbi, and I think your<br />
mother too...<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Bobbi's mother.<br />
<br />
David: Bobbi's mother, OK. But one to...<br />
<br />
Betsy: My mother in law. I was a widow at the time.<br />
<br />
David: ...do some of the accounting because we didn't have an accountant<br />
and wanted just to help out and make some calls to advertisers and<br />
say can you speed up your payment a little bit and also calls to<br />
people that we owed money to, hey we're going to be maybe a little<br />
late. It really didn't look good. That was just a huge amount of<br />
money and so we had to stretch things out and hope that the growth<br />
continued so we could recover some of this.<br />
Betsy really rescued us there. It was amazing. We finally did<br />
stretch things out. What precipitated the separation with my wife<br />
at the time is I went home and told her this had happened and<br />
everything.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Thanksgiving weekend. Day before Thanksgiving.<br />
<br />
David: The day before Thanksgiving is when we got all the information from<br />
the police department and I went home to my wife and she said, "You<br />
dumb...," well I won't repeat the whole thing but, "You are so<br />
stupid. You trust people." "Yes, I trust people." "You shouldn't<br />
trust people like that. Get out of the house. I can't put up with<br />
this anymore." So it was a good thing we had a two family house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had this two family house.<br />
<br />
David: I moved into the bedroom on one side.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He had his office on one side of the top floor in the back bedroom<br />
and his bedroom in the back bedroom on the other side and his<br />
kitchen. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is this the place I was reading about where your bedroom was above<br />
the kitchen?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yes. The Ted Nelson.<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, a lot of things precipitated. Because of that, we had to<br />
make some other changes on personnel and move some people around. I<br />
think after that then Betsy took more of a role in the editorial<br />
end of things.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Stayed there until the bitter end.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The bitter end. Actually, I was there after he was gone.<br />
<br />
David: That's true.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ziff continued to pay me several months after they closed the<br />
magazine to stay behind and clean up because we have a 75,000<br />
square foot building. Make sure that we don't dispose of the<br />
hardware and just basically get it ready.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When you quit at the phone company to start a magazine, that must<br />
have been scary.<br />
<br />
David: I had left Digital Equipment in 1974, and I'm sure you read the<br />
whole rationale behind that, and joined AT&T in marketing,<br />
educational marketing. Same thing I was doing at DEC but obviously<br />
marketing different products to a different mix of customers. AT&T,<br />
back then and perhaps today, they had a real formula that you're in<br />
a job for two years and then they rotate you out or they put you in<br />
another job.<br />
The way AT&T works is they have certain steps. There's a manager<br />
and then a director level. There are levels, one, two, three, four,<br />
five. The operating companies, like Pacific Bell and so on, have<br />
similar steps that are considered a half step below AT&T. What they<br />
do is they rotate you out to an operating company, a half step<br />
promotion, they rotate you back into AT&T, now you're a full step.<br />
You never get a full step in one company.<br />
<br />
They had offered me a rotation to Southern Bell. Birmingham,<br />
Alabama. "No. No." Then probably two or three months later said<br />
we've got an opening in Wisconsin Tel. "Oh my gosh. Come on,<br />
something sensible." I turned them down, which was bad. You can't<br />
turn down. If you turn down three you might as well retire.<br />
<br />
The third one was, in a sense, it wasn't a promotion but it was a<br />
sideways job jump within AT&T itself. I went from having the<br />
education group, which was about eight people, to corporate<br />
communications, which is about 100 people and a huge budget. I was<br />
responsible for all of the marketing communications for the whole<br />
Bell system. Not advertising.<br />
<br />
We had seminar centers, put out all kinds of educational pamphlets,<br />
even a magazine for our customers on how to use the equipment. I<br />
was doing that. It's a big job. It's a 50 hour a week job. Creative<br />
Computing was halfway down the block. I'd go there at lunch time,<br />
see how things were doing.<br />
<br />
As I said a little bit ago, when it looked like we were going to<br />
hit a million dollars I said I've got to get serious about this.<br />
That's when I resigned from AT&T. That was probably the first, I<br />
shouldn't say the first, but that was a major problem with my wife<br />
at that time. You're leaving AT&T? You're leaving all those<br />
benefits? What are you doing, you idiot? We were on the downward<br />
spiral at that point and then the embezzlement just sealed the<br />
whole thing.<br />
<br />
Leaving any job for an unknown thing like you started a little<br />
company and you leave your day job. You're making a real<br />
commitment.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Even once you were at Creative full time, it looks like you did a<br />
lot of everything. You were writing, you were doing programming,<br />
you were being the editor, the publisher and the editor which is<br />
not done anymore.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. I don't know. You can correct me. I don't think I was a<br />
control freak.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. You had Phil Ellenberg. You had just hired Phil Ellenberg as<br />
the advertising manager. Richie was doing it. Where did he come<br />
from? He came from some respectable place. He came from some<br />
respectable place, Phil Ellenberg.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, he did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was like a real person who had a real job, not like the rest of<br />
us. He was the ad manager. I think once you made the step to leave<br />
AT&T then you mostly concentrated on the editorial. You weren't<br />
selling ads and writing and you had Steve North who was doing a lot<br />
of the editorial.<br />
<br />
David: At the beginning, yeah. The thing is I'd be lying if I said I knew<br />
how things were going to go, I knew this was going to be a huge<br />
magazine some day. I had no clue. When I started Creative Computing<br />
there weren't even personal computers at that point. I was<br />
convinced, I guess, that they would come about. I had no idea that<br />
it would be three months later that the Altair came about. It was<br />
more that I thought that an educational magazine like we had been<br />
publishing at DEC should continue.<br />
DEC had dropped off. They stopped publishing Edu when I left the<br />
education group. Well, they published an issue or two but they<br />
really weren't serious about continuing it. Then you had all of<br />
these people out here in the west coast, the Hewlett Packard<br />
computers. They were publishing some good software, they had some<br />
good arrangements with Minnesota Educational Computers Consortium<br />
and some others to distribute stuff that they developed, but there<br />
was no information source for schools and teachers and kids that<br />
were using computers.<br />
<br />
That's what I envisioned initially, but then once the Altair and<br />
the others came out people buy this kit computer and say what can I<br />
do with it? We've got these programs that will run.<br />
<br />
Betsy: First you have to steal Basic.<br />
<br />
David: What?<br />
<br />
Betsy: First you have to steal Basic.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I noticed that, I don't know what it's called, the public opinion<br />
or I don't know the word, this part here. The number one magazine<br />
of computer applications.<br />
<br />
David: That was a Davis thing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It started off first issue a non-profit magazine of educational and<br />
recreational. That was November 1970. May/June 1975 the words non-<br />
profit disappeared.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He never set it up as a non-profit.<br />
<br />
David: I did not.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You started making a profit.<br />
<br />
David: That's right. [laughs]<br />
Betsy; It was the unintentionally non-profit.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Three years later it quietly changed into the number one magazine<br />
of computer applications and software.<br />
<br />
David: That was when Ziff Davis took over.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Really? No, that was '78.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, that was '78.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, '78.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He stayed until the end.<br />
<br />
David: Right. OK. You're right. Who knows. We changed it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It seemed like a good idea at the time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's clearly a shift from education to education plus other things.<br />
<br />
David: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think it was when he realized that if you really wanted to make a<br />
profit you had to leave education behind because teachers want<br />
everything for free, or they certainly did then.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They have some websites for teachers. They still do. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Schools, teachers, yeah, they want everything for free and they get<br />
a lot for free. Places like Huntington Computer Project. There was<br />
one out here, Oregon. Yes, there was. I think it was based right<br />
here in Portland. It would have been, right, if it was in Oregon?<br />
Yes, there was a computing consortium at that time, Hewlett Packard<br />
oriented.<br />
Then you had People's Computer Company down in California that was<br />
sort of providing stuff to schools. They were mostly into<br />
alternative schools and there were a lot of them in the Bay area at<br />
that time. In fact, there was a magazine or a newspaper, big thing,<br />
I don't know how often it came out, called the "De-school Primer".<br />
<br />
It was for people that...I won't say they were hippies but<br />
basically homeschoolers but they got together and said, "We're<br />
going to educate our kids outside of the public education system<br />
but we don't want to do it individually. We'll get together." There<br />
was a big movement there and they were into computers, unlike the<br />
public schools back in '75, '76.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Homeschooling back then was very avant-garde. It was not approved.<br />
<br />
David: Not like today. The shift away from education. That, of course, was<br />
partially driven by the hardware that was then available to people<br />
at home.<br />
When I first started the magazine, I had four editors over the<br />
years, five I guess, but Steve Gray had been publishing a<br />
newsletter, what he called the "Amateur Computer Group Newsletter".<br />
It was for engineers who were scavenging up old parts from<br />
Honeywell and IBM and GE and DEC and trying to put together a<br />
computer. You've got success stories and here's how you can make<br />
this worth together.<br />
<br />
That was a long way away from an Altair, but that's what I was<br />
focusing on, people that were doing that and education. Changed our<br />
focus. You're right. Good observation.<br />
<br />
Kevin: After that, do you feel the focus changed in the next 10 years?<br />
<br />
David: The focus changed largely due to selling the magazine to Ziff<br />
Davis.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When's that?<br />
<br />
David: We were negotiating for a while and I think the sale finally went<br />
through in '83. Yeah, '83. Maybe late '82 but roughly then. They<br />
felt that you need more of a business focus, small business and<br />
people running businesses out of their home. That's where it<br />
started but then we got into real small businesses. I shouldn't say<br />
real but a store front or a small manufacturer, something like<br />
that. That's probably a direction we would not have gone. I<br />
wouldn't have gone on my own.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had a magazine called "Small Business Computing." Remember?<br />
<br />
David: That's right, we did. I would have kept Creative more targeted on<br />
the home market and still education, to some extent, but more on<br />
the home and people that were running a business, a single<br />
entrepreneur. You could review a spreadsheet or a small business<br />
computer or higher end printer or something but not lift it up to<br />
that next level up.<br />
When you're owned by somebody else and they say this is what we<br />
want to do you've got to be responsive to it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Why did you sell? Was it something that had to be done? I've read<br />
the official line.<br />
<br />
David: I think the official line is pretty close to the real line. What<br />
happened is the first magazine, maybe not the very first but the<br />
first sizable magazine, to sell was the Byte and they sold to<br />
McGraw Hill. Then there were three or four other sales. At the time<br />
there were maybe eight special interest publishers in the country.<br />
You had Hurst and CBS magazine and Ziff Davis. Maybe eight serious<br />
ones. There were some others that were, "Oh, it'd be nice if we<br />
could get into it."<br />
What happened is all of us at that point were spending maybe<br />
$100,000, $150,000 on circulation promotion. McGraw Hill says we<br />
want to get out there, we're going to spend a million dollars.<br />
They're mailing 10 times as much as we are. They're going to trade<br />
shows with big, elaborate booths and handing out all kinds of...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Free magazines.<br />
<br />
David: Not only free magazines but other stuff. That was half of it. The<br />
other half, which was probably more than half, was the advertising<br />
sales. We were using reps. We had different reps in different parts<br />
of the country, paying the rep commission on the advertising. When<br />
you are a McGraw Hill or a Hurst or a Ziff Davis you've got an in-<br />
house staff. They would have a reception at one of the computer<br />
conferences, a big deal.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We used to have a hospitality suite at the hotels in some of these<br />
conferences and then we would bring little hunks of cheese that we<br />
cut up from home and sneak the bottles of wine up the back stairway<br />
and they were having these big things with the giant balls of<br />
shrimp.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. It was just an order of magnitude different than what we<br />
could do. What happened, really, was that it got to the point where<br />
there were only three, really two, serious bidders that were still<br />
looking for a magazine and there are still about four magazines,<br />
four decent quality magazines, on the market and one was Compute,<br />
one was Interface Age. Personal Computing had just sold, there was<br />
us, and I forget who the fourth one was. There was four.<br />
<br />
Kevin: There were more magazines than buyers at this point.<br />
<br />
David: That's right. There were a lot more magazines, too, but there were<br />
four major players. One of the buyers, I didn't really regard them<br />
as serious, and that was Atari. I think they wanted to back into<br />
the thing. The two buyers left were CBS, and they had a magazine<br />
division at that time, and Ziff Davis and that was it. I said,<br />
"Man, I've got to make a deal here." That's what happened.<br />
I look back with hindsight. I said the guy, Robert I forget his<br />
last name, that owned Compute magazine, he held out. He held out<br />
until the end and he said, "I'm better than Interface Age," and he<br />
was and whatever the other one was, Family Computing, "I'm better<br />
than them." He got a really nice payoff from CBS because it was the<br />
last one and they wanted him. I don't know. If I had held off a<br />
little more would I have gotten more? Probably.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How much did you get?<br />
<br />
David: Can we publish this figure?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't know. I don't think we ever have.<br />
<br />
David: No, we never have.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's my chance for a scoop.<br />
<br />
David: Pardon?<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's my chance for a scoop.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] I'd rather not say. I can tell you Compute, if you ever<br />
read that number, which you will, it was seven times that much. It<br />
was huge. Huge. At that point, I think CBS just said we've got to<br />
get into this. We've really got to do something. The big loser was<br />
Bob Jones at Interface Age. He had a good magazine. That was a<br />
good, solid magazine. Bob Jones, he went to shows, he was always in<br />
a suit and tie. He would have fit into the corporate environment<br />
very well but he held out too long. I think he was holding out for<br />
even more.<br />
That's what I was afraid of. Less than a year later he was out of<br />
business. There was no way you could compete with these big guys.<br />
I mean Ziff instantly started having these receptions at PC expo...<br />
<br />
Betsy: They had ad reps all over the country.<br />
<br />
David: Ad reps, yeah. Oh my gosh. So we would not have survived.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So again, you timed it right.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Not exactly right but yes. Wasn't bad. Wasn't bad.<br />
<br />
Kevin: But Ziff didn't have it for very long before they let it go. It was<br />
only a couple of years.<br />
<br />
David: It was almost four years. Three and a half years. They did a study,<br />
and this is one of the classics. I've been making a presentation at<br />
Leslie Park last year on the 10 biggest blunders in personal<br />
computing, and actually it's up to 12 now. One was, and I still<br />
feel that it was huge, is that Ziff Davis analyzed that market in<br />
'85 and determined that the home market, the market for home<br />
computers, had reached saturation. Five percent of the homes have a<br />
computer. That's it.<br />
There were three things, three major conclusions from their survey.<br />
I think probably one and a half of them were pretty good and one<br />
and a half were just absolutely wrong. The home market reaching<br />
saturation, wrong. The second one was that they said that the<br />
magazines that would be successful would be those that were focused<br />
on specific brands of computers. Are you getting all that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: With the IBM PC it really brought standardization to the industry.<br />
Their analysis was that Apple and PC were going to be the dominant<br />
players in the future and in that they were right. They said we've<br />
got to have a magazine that's just focused on those two and they<br />
did. What was their Apple magazine? They had two Apple magazines.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A+.<br />
<br />
David: But they also had the one for the Mac.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mac User.<br />
<br />
David: They had two Apple magazines and then PC. PC they spun off a whole<br />
bunch. PC Week.<br />
<br />
Betsy: PC Junior.<br />
<br />
David: A bunch of them. In any event, they were right in that. The other<br />
one that they were semi-right, in the long term future they were<br />
totally wrong but in the short term future they were probably<br />
right, and that they looked at...We had been covering bulletin<br />
board systems. CompuServe, whatever its predecessor was, basically<br />
online type of stuff.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Genie.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. They said that's just a flash in a pan, online stuff. Well, in<br />
'85 it was. It took a while. It took another 8 to 10 years for that<br />
but then oh my God. You know what's happened today. If they had<br />
stuck with Creative Computing and rather than trying to make it a<br />
small business focused magazine but kept the home and the online<br />
focus we would have owned the Internet market today, absolutely<br />
owned it. It would have been a bigger magazine than all the others<br />
put together. Hindsight is 20/20.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I know it wasn't your choice but do you have regret about that?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: At the time it was devastating.<br />
<br />
David: Absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was like someone killing your child.<br />
<br />
David: At the time, we sat in these meetings up in Stanford, Connecticut,<br />
of all places. The reason for that is Bill Ziff. What happened in<br />
the interim a year or two after they purchased Creative Computing<br />
and PC, Bill Ziff came down with cancer really big time and was<br />
afraid of dying next year. So he was moving all of his resources<br />
and the holdings outside of New York to avoid really major<br />
taxation. I'm not sure that Connecticut was much better but he was<br />
splitting them between Connecticut and Florida. Anyway, we wound up<br />
having a bunch of meetings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was trying to maintain residence in Connecticut.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I guess that was it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was living in the Crown Plaza.<br />
<br />
David: I remember the last one. We were up at the hotel.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Crown Plaza. It was Stanford, it wasn't Harvard.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, Stanford.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I said Harvard.<br />
<br />
David: When they finally came and said we're going to shut this down. That<br />
was a devastating time. We probably could have continued to work<br />
for Ziff if we had been willing to go into New York but when you<br />
get used to working a mile or two from where you live the idea of<br />
commuting into New York, who knows what the job would have been.<br />
Bye. That was it. That was, in retrospect, a mistake.<br />
The other thing that happened as a result of Bill Ziff having this<br />
bout with cancer is that Ziff Davis sold off all of their other<br />
special interest magazines. Popular Boating, Popular Photography.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yachting, Modern Bride.<br />
<br />
David: They had a big group of travel magazines. Actually, one of the<br />
things they did after Creative Computing was to shut down...we got<br />
friendly with the publisher and some of the people in the traveling<br />
division and we started doing some freelance travel writing.<br />
I was writing a monthly column for one of the travel magazines that<br />
went to travel agents on automating your travel office and so on,<br />
which was an interesting thing because there's a small business<br />
that really depended upon computers with the reservation systems<br />
and all the airlines had a different reservation system. You had to<br />
have Saber.<br />
<br />
A lot of them would go with one and make an agreement with somebody<br />
else to make their other reservations. In any event, it was a bad<br />
system and I was writing a column on how to make this work for you.<br />
As you know, I don't know how many months later we got into the<br />
Atari camp.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was your next gig?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. It was Joe Sugarman, remember, that hooked us up with Atari.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I thought it was Neil Harris.<br />
<br />
David: He was the one we worked with but it was Sugarman.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because he came from Commodore. I didn't know it was Joe Sugarman.<br />
<br />
David: He ran a company called JS&A for Joe Sugarman and Associates. They<br />
were the first one that took these full page ads in lots of<br />
different magazines and the quarter page...<br />
<br />
Betsy: The first advertorials.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, advertorial. The first print advertorials. Really serious<br />
stuff. Out of that, he spawned at least a dozen other companies.<br />
Sharper Image is a Sugarman and it's a spinoff. They've got a whole<br />
page just focused on this air ionizer or some crazy product, but he<br />
sold tons of that stuff. Then he started offering courses. He was<br />
on the verge of doing some big deal with Atari and so he knew all<br />
the people out there.<br />
I had taken his course and started running the ad. In fact, there's<br />
probably one in one of those issues that is basically a Sugarman<br />
ad. And so anyway, you took the course, too. So we got to know him.<br />
He got to know us, and we kept up. And, oh, OK. Creative Computing<br />
has folded, and I'm trying to get something going with Atari and<br />
getting their magazine really serious. And so he was the one that<br />
hooked us up with them. By the way, I'm surprised that you don't<br />
have Atari Explorer on your website<br />
<br />
Kevin: On the website? Well, the deal with my Atari magazines website is<br />
I've always strove to get permission. Atari can't be owned by the<br />
same company for more than three months at time.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's hard to get permission that way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You can't get permission. But it's out there, elsewhere. There are<br />
other archivists who don't bother to get permission. That's another<br />
good way to do things. Yeah, it's out there. I think Archive.org<br />
has it.<br />
<br />
David: Really? Yeah, because I hadn't seen it. I was looking for<br />
something...I still get inquires every once in a while from<br />
somebody that wants something in one of the previous magazines that<br />
we've published.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That's why I don't' risk it. There's a few magazine that I just<br />
absolutely would not, because it's owned by some giant monolith<br />
corporation now, and they need to hold on everything even if it's<br />
30 years old.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because someday they might be able to make money from it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right. That's why that's not there.<br />
Talk to me about...You did some weird stuff. The weird stuff I'm<br />
thinking of is the board game.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: "Computer Rage."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We just saw that. We might not have even remembered what it was it,<br />
but we saw it last night at the museum.<br />
<br />
David: They have one in the Collection's area of the Computer Museum. They<br />
didn't even know that we published it. I thought, "Look at this."<br />
<br />
Kevin: You did Computer Rage, which was weird; I want to ask you about<br />
that. You did the record album.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The record album made way more sense than the game.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, well it was a guy named Allan. He was a colonel at that time<br />
and he came to see me with the idea for the computer game.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I forgot about that.<br />
<br />
David: He was a colonel in the Army and had something to do with<br />
educational programs. The Army said people should know more about<br />
how computers work and everything else. He said, "The games that<br />
are on the market are pretty tacky and not fun. I've devised<br />
something." We worked together with him. We finally decided, "All<br />
right. We'll publish this game." By the way, he's a general and<br />
finally retired.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But he's not financing his retirement with the royalties of the game.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: No, not at all.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Will anyone buy this?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We did overprint.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't a big seller or big success, but we sold enough of them.<br />
Now the record was a little different. There was a guy named Dick<br />
Moberg who, at the time, was the president of the Philadelphia Area<br />
Computer Society. The first two personal computer festivals were<br />
actually in New Jersey, not the west coast. The West Coast Computer<br />
Faire came later with Jim Warren and that group. John Dilks started<br />
this computer festival in Atlantic City. This was before Atlantic<br />
City was a big casino place, but...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well, it was a casino place, but...<br />
<br />
David: ...but it was pretty tacky.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It still is.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Not like now.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not like now where it's so classy.<br />
<br />
David: In any event, they were having some issues with the hotel and the<br />
convention center in Atlantic City. Dick Moberg said, "We people in<br />
Philadelphia can do a better job than you guys in New Jersey." And<br />
he got together with what was his name? Lenny? And<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh! Saul Levis.<br />
<br />
David: Saul Levis, who was the president of the New Jersey amateur<br />
computer group. The two of them got together and said yeah, it'll<br />
be more convenient if we do a thing in Philadelphia. And Saul<br />
Levis, he had put together the first Trenton computer festival. It<br />
wasn't a big huge thing; it's gotten to be gigantic. In any event<br />
they said OK, we'll do this. At that point, this was '78; the Apple<br />
had just come out and people were making little plug-in<br />
peripherals.<br />
There was a company that...I'm not going to be able to remember who<br />
it was. They made a nice little plug-in board for the Apple. What<br />
they had was a very nice thing on the screen where you could<br />
position notes and then have them played back. So it was a visual<br />
programming of music.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Music Construction Center?<br />
<br />
Betsy: There were ads for it in magazines.<br />
<br />
David: No, it was a guy out of Denver. I don't remember. Anyway, before<br />
that everything had appeared line by line. But there were some<br />
reasonable playback systems that were starting to come on the<br />
market for the S-100 bus. There were about four of them. The<br />
programming was a little bit harrier, but nonetheless they sounded<br />
OK. And then there was still the leftovers in a sense that people<br />
that were doing work on mainframes to process music.<br />
So Dick Moberg said, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could get a number<br />
of these together?" And of course there's the Philadelphia<br />
Orchestra, we'll make it a Philadelphia Computer Music Festival! So<br />
it was largely his idea, but then, how do you publicize it? Well,<br />
you've got this magazine that's in your backyard, that was willing<br />
to recruit some people and publicize it. So we got about...I don't<br />
know at the festival there were probably 25 or 30 people that had<br />
stuff.<br />
<br />
They recorded it all, which in retrospect was a bit of a mistake<br />
because they had problems with one of the two channels in the<br />
stereo. They had the big reel-to-reel tape recorder, one of the<br />
channels was seriously too low. And then they said, "Well, we've<br />
got this wonderful tape; what are we going to do with it?" And I<br />
said, "Well, I'll do something with it."<br />
<br />
I hooked up with a studio in the city that made records, and we<br />
went in there and corrected the low channel a little bit, not<br />
totally, but enough that it sounded like stereo. And put together a<br />
vinyl record!<br />
<br />
I edited out a lot of the poor quality performances, made the<br />
record, and that sold! It sold pretty well. Our biggest problem was<br />
shipping. How do you ship a 12-inch vinyl record without it<br />
breaking? But that sold pretty well. That, of course, died off<br />
along with everything else when Creative Computing got killed by<br />
Ziff. But, I still had the original test pressing of that, the<br />
original, original.<br />
<br />
I played it back, and it sounded very good. Put it into, I forget<br />
what the software was, but, it was one, the digital routine. It<br />
would have been nice if I still had the original tape, but, I<br />
didn't. But, OK, it's got a little bit of deterioration, going to a<br />
record.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, we're not talking about losing overtones of a<br />
violin up at 15,000 hertz. It was within a narrow band, to begin<br />
with, in any event. But that did let me totally correct the left<br />
channel and bring it up to what it should be. I put that out. I'm<br />
selling CDs now, of that.<br />
<br />
In fact, a guy from Australia ordered one, and obviously, the<br />
postage to send anything overseas is a lot more. He said, "Why<br />
don't you just make MP3 files out of it?" Because, they're WAV<br />
files, the way they are now. I go, "OK."<br />
<br />
This is very recent, like within the last couple of weeks, I<br />
downloaded some software, "Convert WAV to MP3," converted it, sent<br />
them the files. They said, "That's great." What I think what I'll<br />
probably do is try to figure out how I can make them available from<br />
a website.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You've apparently forgotten that, like, 10 years ago, I did that.<br />
They're there.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. I know.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They're at vintagecomputermusic.com.<br />
<br />
David: Are they MP3s?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Well, then, I don't have to do it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You dummy.<br />
<br />
David: Bam. I did remember. I didn't know that you did them all. I thought<br />
you did a sample.<br />
<br />
Kevin: No. They're all there. I can see you're getting reflux.<br />
<br />
David: Boom. I wasted a little time. I waste a lot of time, these days.<br />
That was a cool thing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just think it was neat that you guys were willing to take chances<br />
with weird stuff.<br />
<br />
David: Where we took chances with really weird stuff was in the software.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Software publishing?<br />
<br />
David: We had a brand called, Sensational Software. Unfortunately, Ziff<br />
decided it was competing with some potential advertisers, which it<br />
was, in a sense. They killed it off. But, we had some really good<br />
stuff. We had the Apple game, what the heck was it? It was ported<br />
directly over from the arcade games.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Was it, "Space Invaders"?<br />
<br />
David: "Space Invaders."<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was a clone of, "Space Invaders"?<br />
<br />
David: It was the real.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You got it from, Jeff Lee's guy.<br />
<br />
David: Because, "Space Invaders," the Japanese game, was one of the first<br />
full-sized console video games where they used a general-purpose<br />
chip. "Space Invaders," was programmed for the 6502, Apple.<br />
We bought it from this Japanese company, and we had the only real<br />
"Space Invaders" game. That was one, and a couple of others that we<br />
really could have gone places with. That was just about the time<br />
that Ziff came in and said, "Nah, you can't have this anymore."<br />
<br />
They were into printed media, so, they kept the books going, but,<br />
not any of the other stuff. The other thing we had, was, speaking<br />
of computer music, a little division, that probably could have<br />
gotten a lot bigger, called Peripherals Plus. We were marketing a<br />
little computer music board, it was an S-100 bus once. But if we<br />
had then...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Didn't we have a plotter, too?<br />
<br />
David: Yep. We had about five or six interesting, low-level products. But,<br />
again, Ziff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That stuff was really competing with the advertisers.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Obviously, that wasn't our intent. But, yes it was. We also<br />
offered courses at that time. Do you remember, at County College?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't.<br />
<br />
David: That was just at when we moved into the new building at Hanover. We<br />
had two people that were doing that.<br />
<br />
Betsy: One of them was that crazy, Larry guy. He was seriously weird.<br />
<br />
David: County College of Morris, we reached an agreement that we would<br />
teach their Introductory Computer course. Not for their day<br />
students, but they offered evening courses, adult education, we<br />
were doing that. Fingers in a lot of pies, at that point.<br />
Actually, from that standpoint, it was, probably, good that Ziff<br />
got us a little bit more focused, and back to the roots of<br />
publishing. Getting spread a little thin.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You went to Atari, got the Atari game, and you did the "Atari<br />
Explorer," right?<br />
<br />
David: "Atari Explorer." They had had an occasional publication, not<br />
really a magazine, but one that was focused on the games, and they<br />
decided that they could start that one up again. It started up with<br />
a new name. We called it, "Atarian." It was focused, basically, on<br />
video games. You buy one of their video games and you get an issue.<br />
Anyway, there were different ways that they were going to promote<br />
it.<br />
But, a year later Nintendo just, absolutely, buried "Atarian," in<br />
'89. They kept Atari Spore going for, I think, two more issues,<br />
right?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Was it two?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember the details.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't much.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I remember why they killed it.<br />
<br />
David: Ms. Feisty here. Come on. You've got to tell the story here.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They were playing games with our printer. Production schedule.<br />
Everybody had a production schedule. We never missed our production<br />
date, getting things to the printer, getting them mailed. We just<br />
did it because that's what you had to do. I will probably get sued<br />
for this. Atari started not paying the printer and the printer says<br />
we're not going to print this until we get paid. The date kept<br />
slipping and slipping and the subscribers would be calling up and<br />
saying, "Where's my magazine?"<br />
This went on for.. it was bi-monthly. It went on for maybe six months. I<br />
finally wrote an editorial in which I explained to the readers<br />
exactly what was going on. They didn't see it until it was printed.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
David: That didn't get into the magazine, though.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It did.<br />
<br />
David: That's right, it did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They never saw it. We were producing it out of Mendham<br />
New Jersey and printing it in eastern Pennsylvania and they never<br />
saw it until it was too late. My tenure was cut short but I didn't<br />
really care at that point. I was sick of them. It was really hard.<br />
They're not easy people to deal with, even when the owners last for<br />
more than three months. That was my suicide by editorial. The only<br />
time in my life I've ever been fired.<br />
<br />
David: I didn't realize they didn't read that beforehand but I should<br />
have. I should have.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] I probably wouldn't have gotten fired if they had.<br />
<br />
David: That was kinda the straw that broke the camel's back.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But then John [inaudible 01:11:05 - Genshi? Genji?] kept doing it a little bit.<br />
<br />
David: I know. In a lot of cases, particularly with the games magazine,<br />
they wanted to approve everything that went in it. If you do an<br />
objective product review, you call it like it is. Oh my gosh, there<br />
was one, it wasn't just one product but a roundup after Consumer<br />
Electronics' show, and I don't remember what it was. Atari had<br />
brought out some new products that really weren't ready to go.<br />
In some cases I just said, "I'm not going to say anything about<br />
this one or these two or three. I'll focus on the ones that are<br />
ready to go or are in good shape." Oh my gosh. "What about this?<br />
This is a wonderful thing." "Well, maybe it will be but it isn't<br />
yet." We had issues all along on censorship and them changing what<br />
we had written and everything. As Betsy said, they were not nice<br />
people to work with. I forget, the two brothers.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Trammell.<br />
<br />
David: Trammell, yeah. That came from Commodore.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Jack and somebody else. Jack and his brother.<br />
<br />
David: It was interesting because yesterday I saw Nolan Bushnell. He was<br />
at that event. Nolan was flamboyant, but basically he had integrity<br />
and he was an honest guy. Man, oh man. Didn't stay and the<br />
corporation changed after he left.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Then you're done with Atari and then it's straight to military<br />
vehicles there?<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] No.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was a hiatus.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, man. We published magazines, in-house magazines, for a couple<br />
other organizations. Did one for Nabisco called...I don't even<br />
remember but it was for their marketing department. Published that<br />
for some period of time and then they decided to bring it in-house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was more like a newsletter.<br />
<br />
David: It was 16 pages. It was getting there.<br />
<br />
Betsy: 16 pages is a newsletter.<br />
<br />
David: All right. Magazine format. Let's put it that way. We did some<br />
fulfillment. Basically, a lot of freelance writing on the travel<br />
field.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Stuffed dogs. The stuffed dogs. Remember those four dogs for my<br />
brother?<br />
<br />
David: That's fulfillment. Fulfillment for Con Edison. I published a<br />
couple newsletters for a while, one called "Effective Investing"<br />
and one called "Effective Communication" for writers. We're talking<br />
early '90s.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was when people still cared, thought that there might be a<br />
correct way to do something and they wanted to know what it was.<br />
<br />
David: That was focused on "Take this computer and start to use it as a<br />
tool. Don't be afraid of the thing." '91/'92 not everybody was<br />
using a computer yet or a personal computer. That was the<br />
orientation of that. Then the other thing we got into big time was<br />
we'd been involved with a local rescue mission for men with drug,<br />
alcohol, homeless issues and we were writing and producing their<br />
newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We were producing all of their fundraising material.<br />
<br />
David: We started, I think, with the newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, we did everything. Appeal letters and newsletters and<br />
maintaining their database, the donor database. It took a lot of<br />
time.<br />
<br />
David: We did that for five years. Then '96 I got an opportunity to buy<br />
this crazy military vehicles magazine for people that were<br />
restoring old historic military vehicles. It was a magazine but it<br />
was I guess more of a glorified newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was horrible.<br />
<br />
David: It was horrible but it was really terrible. In fact, the editor or<br />
the publisher, whatever, the owner, he'd take the articles however<br />
the writer would send them. If it was double spaced type, boom,<br />
that's what would appear in the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Save all the typesetting.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He had zero typesetting expense.<br />
<br />
David: Zero editing. He just took anything that came in, put it in. Ads<br />
the same way. Half the ads were hand written. Well, not half, but a<br />
significant number had corrections on them by hand. Oh my gosh. It<br />
was so terrible. I made it into a real magazine and built it up. At<br />
that point the circulation had been about 10,000. We built it up<br />
and we were pushing close to 20,000 magazines. It was a real<br />
magazine. I sold it to Crowsey publications.<br />
Then they, which I did not realize at the time, the owner, Chet<br />
Crowsey, had put the whole company up for sale and he sold the<br />
company a year or two later to some other specialty magazine<br />
publisher. We're talking narrow, narrow niche. They published a lot<br />
of, what'd they call it, white tail bow hunting. Really, really<br />
narrow stuff. Up in northern Wisconsin is where they were based. In<br />
any event, he sold it.<br />
<br />
The new publishers, their whole stick was making money. They<br />
immediately raised the subscription price of military vehicles. We<br />
were charging $18 a year which was fine and they raised it to<br />
$21.95 or something and they raised the advertising rates and<br />
everything else.<br />
<br />
The last I knew, the circulation was back down around 10,000.<br />
[laughs] It doesn't pay off to take that approach. I didn't have<br />
the same emotional connection, with that as I did with Creative<br />
Computing and the other magazines there. Fine, you do what you want<br />
with the magazine, it's OK.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You didn't care too much?<br />
<br />
David: Nah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What do you guys do now? It seems like charity work and [inaudible<br />
01:19:45] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. I run a non-profit called Beyond the Walls and he runs his<br />
website and does Bible studies.<br />
<br />
David: Right. Actually, Betsy, the organization she has, she's executive<br />
director of Beyond the Wall, that's gotten huge.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's getting bigger and bigger.<br />
<br />
David: It's gotten huge.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think huge is probably an exaggeration.<br />
<br />
David: Well, not huge like a Gates Foundation thing.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I wish. We started in 2005 with 26 volunteers going to Guatemala to<br />
work with this organization that works with the people who scavenge<br />
in the Guatemala City garbage dump. The dump is in a ravine. It<br />
started in the early '50s and as it has filled up around the edges<br />
they put a couple layers of sand on it and let it sit for a bit and<br />
then the people build houses on it out of scraps and things that<br />
they made.<br />
This organization called Potter's House that we work with has been<br />
working with them for 26 years. They have an education program,<br />
micro-enterprise and health and various things that they do. Since<br />
2005 we've been sending volunteer teams. We're not the only ones<br />
sending volunteer teams down there to build houses and do<br />
healthcare and do stuff with the kids. So we started with 26 and by<br />
the end of the year we'll be well over 150 volunteers. We'll have<br />
three weeks this summer, I'll have 135 over three weeks this<br />
summer.<br />
<br />
It started in our backyard and one of the reasons that we wanted<br />
to...It started in the church and we started the organization<br />
partially because it's easier to raise money if you're not a church<br />
and it's also easier to make the volunteer opportunities available<br />
to people. If you say "Oh I'm going to Guatemala." "Oh I'd love to<br />
go with you! Who's going?" "It's my church." "Oh."<br />
<br />
But, if it's this local non-profit it's more appealing and we've<br />
really succeeded in doing that because we have people not only from<br />
in our own community, but this year we're going to have a family<br />
from Oklahoma, about six families from Texas, several people from<br />
Florida.<br />
<br />
David: You got the Virginia.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Virginia. It's like oh my goodness. How is this happening?<br />
<br />
Kevin: And everyone goes out to Guatemala and does the [inaudible<br />
01:22:31] ?<br />
[cross talk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. We all meet in Guatemala. I have three teams. One each week,<br />
and I'll be there the whole time and they'll come down and probably<br />
each team will build two or three houses. They'll do medical<br />
clinic, they'll do day camp for kids, soccer or baseball, sports<br />
things.<br />
They were about teenagers, so they love to do the...Everybody does<br />
construction in the morning. Then, in the afternoon teenage girls<br />
and some of the boys who want to do other stuff will help out with<br />
these other kid-related activities. That's what I'm doing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My wife is in Africa this week and last doing something similar.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Cool.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Which is why I have to leave shortly to go get my kids.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: What part of Africa is she in?<br />
<br />
Kevin: She did some stuff for Special Olympics. Then, they were helping<br />
build something at a food bank. I don't know that much yet, because<br />
she's not home yet.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Cool.<br />
<br />
David: That's terrific. She'll be changed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: She keeps telling that she wished I could've come, and I do, too.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You have this kid. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: We've got the two kids. The six-year-old doesn't feed herself real<br />
well.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: She can't drive to school.<br />
<br />
David: Your annual budget has gone from 0 to what? Are you going to hit<br />
about 150, 200,000 this year?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's over 300 already.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, OK. [laughs] 300.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's small potatoes compared to...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: As my boss, the Chairman of the Board, and I'm the only employee,<br />
is fond of saying, "The people out there don't realize that we're<br />
just a bunch of schlumps sitting around a table making this stuff<br />
up as we go along. Very good leadership. He's a very good leader.<br />
<br />
David: We were trying to maybe see if we can touch base with the Gates<br />
Foundation when we were up there. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: We got a brochure into his hands.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we got a brochure into his hands and some other stuff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was Bill Gates there?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah. I had a picture of him that I had taken at the first<br />
Altair convention in 1976, before he had actually made the deal<br />
with Altair to develop BASIC. He had said, "I can do it," but they<br />
hadn't signed the whole thing. I've got a picture of him as a 20-<br />
year-old or thereabouts, talking at this little convention.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You showed it to him?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. I gave him a copy. The problem I had is that...some people<br />
keep everything. I pretty much give everything away.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, you are lying. You keep everything.<br />
<br />
David: I do keep a lot of stuff. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Then, you give it away later. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Well, when Stan Freiberger was putting together the "Fire in<br />
the Valley" book, I gave him a lot of photographs and I gave him<br />
the originals. Then the publisher said, "It's not good enough. The<br />
photo. You get the negative." OK, they're gone. Never any of that<br />
came back. In fact, what I had to do is scan the photo from the<br />
book to make the print to give to Bill.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Photos of being young and cute.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was his Woody Allen phase. He looked exactly like Woody Allen<br />
did at that phase in his life.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:26:30] too.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm sure there is.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It is a lot [inaudible 01:26:33] .<br />
<br />
David: She improves with age. Every year.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I saw the picture! You look the same.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, the instant Paul Allen showed up, of course, everybody's<br />
mingling around this museum. All of a sudden there was like an<br />
arrow head over in that direction.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was this sucking sound.<br />
<br />
David: And then Bill shows up and, oh my God, everybody has to go see<br />
Bill.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was talking to Bob Rynett this morning, the guy who organized it,<br />
and he said, "Oh, Paul was very happy. Paul was very pleased with<br />
the way the event went." He said his only regret was that he and<br />
Bill didn't have enough time to spend with the people. And I'm<br />
thinking, "Well, OK, if you just stayed a little longer."<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Well, at least Paul Allen did come to the dinner.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, he stayed a little longer, but Bill, he was in and out like<br />
a...<br />
<br />
David: Bill was there for maybe an hour.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He just showed up because he had to.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, exactly. It was a cameo.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:27:52] cameo there?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, yes. There I am. I was thinner then. Oh! There's Ted in his<br />
hat! And Peter [inaudible 01:28:02] . Who's that guy?<br />
<br />
David: Dick Heiser was at the convention and he had one of the hats. The<br />
Xanadu hat.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was wearing one of those hats. The rings were actually silver.<br />
Oh and there's Johnny Anderson. He's the one that wrote that<br />
crazy...<br />
<br />
This was our building.<br />
<br />
David: That was the greenhouse garage building that we started. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: And there was a hole. Was it you or my brother that made a hole in<br />
the wall for an air conditioner?<br />
<br />
David: It was your brother.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And the building was painted white after...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is that the air conditioner? You comment about the low tech air<br />
conditioning.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, that was in an actual window. This building had been painted<br />
white after and right about here a hole had been made in the wall<br />
for this through-the-wall air conditioner. It was rented and when<br />
we moved out, we had this hole in the wall. So, my brother takes<br />
this spare ceiling panel that we had. It was white and sort of<br />
stuffed it in the hole and filled it up so that it really didn't<br />
show any more. We never heard any more about it.<br />
<br />
David: That building today is...<br />
<br />
Betsy: They've made it very fancy.<br />
<br />
David: Oh my gosh! It's a boutique shop and it's really nice. And they<br />
didn't even tear it down. It wasn't a tear-down and rebuild. At any<br />
event, we were not into spending money on facilities. Absolutely<br />
not. The last place that we were in was a printing company had<br />
owned it and they had taken three very small houses that backed up<br />
to railroad tracks and then they built a large warehouse at the end<br />
that was relatively modern. Then they just connected the three<br />
houses with little walkway and so we were in the first house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You couldn't tell that it was two houses.<br />
<br />
David: No. The art department was in the second, then the software group<br />
was in the third one. We had our fulfillment and storage and stuff<br />
in the warehouse.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How much money did you spend on the facility?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not much.<br />
<br />
David: We were spending money on expansion, growing, grow, grow. Then Ziff<br />
Davis comes in, they say, "You got this wonderful warehouse."<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's our warehouse now, right?<br />
<br />
David: That's right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It wasn't though, because you owned it.<br />
<br />
David: I know, but in any event, they said we're going to use it. We're<br />
moving some of your operation, advertising, sales into New York,<br />
therefore you will have more space. It wasn't the trade-off of the<br />
same kind of space or anything. What they did is, they have all<br />
these other magazines at that point, things like "Popular Boating"<br />
and "Yachting" and everything else. All of those magazines, when<br />
you subscribed you got a premium. You got a tote bag or something.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A backpack or a cushion.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. They moved all of their premium fulfillment out to our<br />
warehouse. They said, "Because you're not going to have a software<br />
department anymore, so you won't have to ship any software. We're<br />
going to bring all of our premiums out there." We still have<br />
"Yachting" bags.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yachting bags and seat bags.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Speaking of fulfillment that was something that we did. We were<br />
real pioneers in doing our own fulfillment.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: That's true...<br />
<br />
Betsy: All magazines then used fulfillment houses. You would just send all<br />
the little cards and white mail and everything to your fulfillment<br />
house and they would just take care, enter it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Reader service cards and...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Exactly, and then they would send the labels.<br />
<br />
David: Everything went either to Boulder, Colorado, Des Moines, Iowa, or<br />
some place in Florida.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So when you say pioneers, does that mean you were cheap?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well no, because we were not getting good service, we weren't happy<br />
with the service the readers were getting. And so we decided to<br />
bring it in it house, and we brought a program from a company in<br />
Boston that had written a program to run a PDP11.<br />
And we did we brought the whole thing in-house. We had our own data<br />
entry people. Did all the caging, taking the money out in-house.<br />
Printed our own labels and ship, because then you had to print them<br />
and ship them because there was no electronic delivery.<br />
<br />
David: You know we were real pioneers there and we did spent some money.<br />
Because PDP1170 was not a low-end, with a platter and disk, 12<br />
inch, maybe 15 inch, but a big, big platter drive, and data entry<br />
terminals, DECWriters, VT05. And when Ziff came in, I mean they<br />
were blown away that we were doing our own fulfillment, and doing a<br />
very efficiently.<br />
And the other thing we were doing also was the reader service<br />
cards. We were doing all our own processing of that. The same<br />
computer is same system. A Mini Data System, that's what it was.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No.<br />
<br />
David: No? OK.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mini data was the one you were using...<br />
<br />
[Day 2]<br />
<br />
<br />
David: A couple of the questions you asked yesterday got us to thinking<br />
about things we probably should have mentioned or clarified.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK let's go, let me grab a pen.<br />
<br />
David: One of the corrections, Betsy remembered better than I. the<br />
embezzlement that we were talking about was actually 79 not 78 it<br />
doesn't make a lot of difference but was a year later. It was a<br />
year after I had left my day job, and I was really depending upon<br />
Creative Computing for my income and everything else. So to lose<br />
that was a big blow at that time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So that could have been the end of things right there?<br />
<br />
David: Yes absolutely it could have.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was 79 not 78, is what you're saying.<br />
<br />
David: That's what I said it was 79 not 78.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I was going to ask you to move closer to the microphone.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Actually I don't have to do this. My ego is completely uninvolved.<br />
I would go sit and play with the cats.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Please, please be here. You supplement Dave's memory.<br />
<br />
David: Yes exactly she's very good at that.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: I want to know, how are you going to know how to spell things? He<br />
used the name John Dilks. If you go to write it out, how do you<br />
know how to spell John Dilks?<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'll either Google it, and if it's not in Wikipedia, I'll have to<br />
come back to you and ask, or if they're mentioned in the magazines.<br />
I'll do my best.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm not saying it in a critical way, I'm just impressed that you<br />
don't ask.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just feel this way, I can have everything. I don't have to write<br />
it down. I can concentrate on the conversation, rather than taking<br />
notes.<br />
<br />
David: OK. One thing I thought would be kind of worthwhile...putting the<br />
whole era of the early computer magazines into a perspective. In a<br />
sense, personal computing itself went through several eras as it<br />
accelerated and became so widespread. It certainly didn't start<br />
that way.<br />
You almost have to look at a period before there were personal<br />
computers -- the pre-personal computer era, which I would say would<br />
be 1972 or so up through '75, when the first computers came out.<br />
What was happening then was you had big time-sharing systems.<br />
<br />
Then, manufacturers like DEC and HP were making smaller time-<br />
sharing systems for terminals on a computer. Specifically, Bob<br />
Albrecht opened up People's Computer Company down in San Carlos,<br />
San Mateo, one of the "Sans." It was an open to the public place.<br />
What were people going to do with computers? Well, he wrote this<br />
book of what to do after you hit return, of games.<br />
<br />
Then I wrote my book, not for his center, but for people in the<br />
east that had access to the same type of things on DEC computers.<br />
Those two books actually came out in '72. That was well<br />
before....There was an impetus for people to use computers. Even<br />
though it was mini-computers and they didn't really have their own,<br />
they did have access.<br />
<br />
That, I think, was an important thing because, then, when the kit<br />
computers first came out, which is '75, we really had the kit<br />
computer era from '75 to around '78. That's when it primary was,<br />
the do-it-yourself, build-it-yourself.<br />
<br />
Who did those computers appeal to? It was largely people who were<br />
OK with things like soldering guns. That was largely HAM radio<br />
people. You look at "73" magazine and "Radio Electronics," those<br />
were the ones that dragged the hardware people into the field, and<br />
"Popular Electronics," of course, with the Altair in January, '75.<br />
<br />
You had to know something about, and be a little bit capable with<br />
your hands to get into it. That continued but dwindled off by 1980,<br />
because of course, in '78, you had the three biggies, not biggies,<br />
but self-contained, assembled computers: the Commodore PET, TRS-80,<br />
and the Apple all came out in '78. They were proprietary platforms,<br />
nobody was sharing stuff.<br />
<br />
Actually, the S-100 bus was more shareable. More people got a card<br />
that you could plug into the S-100 bus. There was more, but on the<br />
other hand, you had to build it. That was really a stumbling block<br />
for a lot of people. Then processor technology with the SAL. OK,<br />
here's an S-100 bus machine, but it's all built. That was a big<br />
leap.<br />
<br />
Anyway, you had the, what I call, proprietary era from '78 to '82.<br />
Then it kind of dwindled off, although Apple certainly kept going.<br />
When the IBM PC came out, '81, '82, '83, that ushered in the<br />
standardization era. Everybody, "OK, we're going to make an IBM PC<br />
clone." It was really only Apple, and to a lesser extent, the Atari<br />
and the Commodore that kept going with their own proprietary stuff.<br />
They really couldn't keep going.<br />
<br />
At that time, we started working with Atari. They using the same<br />
chip that Apple had. I thought, "Man, that's an opportunity. Why<br />
don't they just make an agreement with Apple to run Apple software<br />
and everything." They got a 6502, that family of chips in there,<br />
why not? But that wasn't Atari's way of doing things, as you well<br />
know.<br />
<br />
In any event, they went through those stages. As a new one came<br />
along, the other one died off. That though then affected the<br />
magazines, Creative Computing, we came from the pre-era, in a<br />
sense. From the education applications and people having access to<br />
small, minicomputer time sharing systems. When Altair basic was<br />
announced, then it was the obvious thing that we would port over<br />
programs to that.<br />
<br />
Other magazines such as "Byte" and some of the hardware magazines,<br />
they really came from the HAM radio end of things. Wayne Green, who<br />
started "Byte," was publishing "73," which was the biggest magazine<br />
in HAM radio. HAM fests were one of the earliest places where<br />
computers were, or at least hardware, do-it-yourself computers were<br />
really seen and popularized. Wasn't till a little later that we had<br />
computer festivals.<br />
<br />
The real early computer festivals in '75, '76, had a big overlap<br />
with Ham radio. The early ones in New Jersey. That was the earliest<br />
ones. It was, I think, more, not more, but at least half was<br />
oriented to Ham radio. Then, it broadened out, of course, with more<br />
applications being reproduced. Anyway, I think it's kind of<br />
important to know how things fit into that whole scheme of things.<br />
<br />
Magazines either came from the Ham radio and hardware side of<br />
things. They had a different perspective than those like Creative<br />
Computing.<br />
<br />
Well, Peoples' Computer Company, Bob Aldberg, could have had a real<br />
winning magazine, but he was too much in the alternative mode. So,<br />
Peoples' Computer Company never really made it as a magazine. He<br />
didn't want to do advertising or anything that would...<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was a different avenue. It was more like a tabloid-style<br />
newspaper.<br />
<br />
David: Newspaper, yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was more glossy.<br />
<br />
David: Exactly.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was a very different field.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Again, magazine publishing. I remember, early on, I was on a<br />
TV show. McNeil Lehrer Report on Public Broadcasting. Life Magazine<br />
was being re-launched and Time-Warner was spending a ton of money<br />
on this re-launch. They had the publisher of Life Magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was probably Time-Life back then. I don't think it...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. That's right. It wasn't Time. Well, I think it was close to<br />
the time that they merged. Anyway. Yeah. It was Time-Life. Then,<br />
they had me. Sort of the opposite extreme.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You're going to be covered in cat hair by the time you're here.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, I am sure.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's OK. But it matches and sort of goes with it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. It matches fine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You have kind of a theme here. The black and white.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes. Yes. Sorry to interrupt.<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, they were interviewing both of us. They were going to spend<br />
more money on their first issue than our entire annual budget, for<br />
everything. The difference in big publishers, because we we're<br />
talking about that a little bit yesterday, is huge. Really huge.<br />
Now, the interesting thing is there was a magazine back then. I<br />
don't know if it's still around today, called Folio. It was a<br />
magazine for magazine publishers. They covered all aspects of it.<br />
Subscription fulfillment, typesetting and everything else and the<br />
business aspects of running a magazine.<br />
<br />
They had some figures, which were true for a long period of time.<br />
That one out of seven magazine startups makes it for one year. One<br />
out of seven. That's low. Of those, one out of seven makes it for<br />
five years. So, were talking about...<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think Wayne told me almost the exact same statistic.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. One out of 50 new magazines makes it for five years or more.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: Once you make it five years, you're probably good to go for awhile.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
The new Life Magazine comes back, roaring back in. Where are they<br />
today, or even 10 years later from that point. Gone. Didn't make<br />
it. In any event, yesterday we were talking a little bit about<br />
where did we put all our money.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
David: Well, all our money wasn't an awful lot compared to big publishers.<br />
We were a small player. We're big in that field, but...<br />
<br />
Kevin: You're a big fish in a little bowl.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Yeah. There wasn't a lot. Betsy reminded me this morning that<br />
one of the things we did to, in a sense, keep control, is we bought<br />
our own typesetting equipment.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Used of course.<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Used.<br />
<br />
David: Used. Yes. We didn't want to send stuff out to a typesetter<br />
where...what did you [inaudible 00:14:22] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was the same thing with the fulfillment. You are sending it to a<br />
service that gives your work to a minimum wage person who couldn't<br />
care less. Puts her time in and...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Plus you still had code and things that needed to be done right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Done right. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Otherwise it was useless.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. We didn't typeset the code usually. We would actually pace<br />
down the printouts. Part of it was for efficiency and probably, in<br />
the long run, it was cheaper. Just to turn your typesetting around,<br />
send it out and wait for your galleys to come back. Then you<br />
proofread them. Then you'd send it back. Then they make the<br />
corrections maybe and you get it back again. So we said, well...and<br />
then we got this used, copy graphic was it?<br />
<br />
David: Mm-hmm. Yep.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Typesetter. Found a young woman who knew typesetting and hired her.<br />
We bought our own stat camera. We always used to have to send all<br />
the stats and [inaudible 00:15:34] out to be made.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: That was huge then before...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Had our own darkroom.<br />
<br />
David: ...everything was computerized publishing. Yeah. We had our own<br />
darkroom and our own stat camera with the thing that goes over a<br />
screen basically to make it into dots.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: To do that. To make those negatives or [inaudible 00:15:56] , which<br />
are the positive. That was something again. You sent it out and you<br />
get it back.<br />
I said, "Oh, you know what, we got a little more type here than<br />
expected. We want to crop this. Well, we send it out again, and oh<br />
my gosh." Doing all of that in-house, but it cost money. In a<br />
sense, just for the hardware and capital improvements that you<br />
needed to do that.<br />
<br />
We were spending it on that and expansion into other things like<br />
the software. One of the other ones that I was thinking of that we<br />
did, that certainly, really didn't bring us any tangible reward,<br />
was that we were doing some consulting when we started developing<br />
software. We started doing consulting to places like the<br />
Exploratorium in San Francisco. And Sesame Place. That was a big<br />
one for us.<br />
<br />
Sesame Place was a theme park right in our own backyard in New<br />
Jersey. They were going to have these terminals that you could go<br />
up to. One of the programs was Mix and Match the Muppets. You could<br />
take different parts of Muppets and combine them. We wrote a part<br />
of that routine and a whole bunch of stuff that made computers and<br />
these things not computers but approachable things for kids.<br />
<br />
We did some work for the Capital Children's Museum in Washington<br />
and Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Again, did it help us?<br />
Maybe. Did we gain a little reputation? Maybe. Did it translate to<br />
the bottom line? Probably not. As Betsy said, it was fun for you to<br />
do that, wasn't it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, it was fun. It gave him fun things to do.<br />
<br />
David: That was one way that we, in a sense, spent some money.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It makes sense. You guys were the computer experts, probably by<br />
orders of magnitude. Who are they going to go to?<br />
<br />
David: That's right. Interactive games, yeah. I already had a good selling<br />
book out there that was visible, known. We did a lot of that kind<br />
of stuff. Some of it was just fun to do. Another place where we put<br />
I won't say a lot of money but we went to a lot of these shows,<br />
well, there were some that were strictly personal computer shows,<br />
but then also tried to push into things like the consumer<br />
electronics show.<br />
We were the only magazine at the consumer electronics. That's a<br />
huge, huge show. Twice a year, one in Chicago and one in Las Vegas.<br />
We'd take the smallest booth that you could but, still, it was a<br />
fair chunk of change to go to that, but that's how I felt we got<br />
the reach. They were pushing at a lower level. That was video games<br />
mostly at that point. Although we weren't in that market, I just<br />
felt that that was someplace that we wanted to be.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you think that was worthwhile?<br />
<br />
David: I don't know. We were mainly looking for retail stores to sell the<br />
magazine. That was my main purpose for going there. No, it probably<br />
wasn't. It probably was not and it cost us a lot of money to go to<br />
the shows. You have to experiment and do those things. We started<br />
reporting on new developments at the consumer electronics show and<br />
there was some overlap with Computer Inc but it was mostly video<br />
games. No, it didn't have a real good payoff. [laughs]<br />
Then there was the Boston show we went to where Betsy's feistiness<br />
really came out. You go to those shows. I'm not talking about one<br />
of these local computer shows or something. You go to a big show.<br />
You've got to use union labor. We had a computer at our booth. We<br />
wanted to plug it in. You're going to plug in your computer? No,<br />
you can't plug it in. You've got to hire an electrician for an hour<br />
for $75 to plug in your computer.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was a bit extreme. I don't think that was actually true.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know how much it was but you had to use union labor for<br />
different things. Betsy took exception to that at one show and<br />
actually came to blows.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was carrying stuff off the show floor. We were trying to get out.<br />
It was in Boston and we were going to drive back and we were trying<br />
to...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Go home at the end of the show?<br />
<br />
Betsy: ...go home at the end of the show. We were just carrying our<br />
cartons of leftover magazines and books and some union guy comes to<br />
me and starts telling me you can't do this and he was being very<br />
rude. So I punched him in the arm. [laughs] They were not happy.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you have to hire a special punching person to do that?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yes, exactly. I should have consulted with the shop steward before<br />
doing that.<br />
<br />
David: There was a follow-up to that. I'm not absolutely sure but I think<br />
the guy that was running that show was Shelley Adelman. He then<br />
approached us after that little incident. You can't do this. Betsy<br />
was really in his face about come on. We're a tiny little nit. Sure<br />
we can do it. We can carry our own stuff.<br />
Shelley Adelman, whose name you probably heard today, in a sense,<br />
got his start by running these smaller shows around the country and<br />
then he built up to running PC Expo in New York and Las Vegas and<br />
then he got into you run a show in Las Vegas you've got to make<br />
deals with the hotels and so on.<br />
<br />
The earlier PC shows in Las Vegas did not use the convention<br />
center. They were held in I think probably the Hilton. He got to<br />
know hotel people there and he started buying into hotels and today<br />
Shelley Adelman is huge. Not Caesars but he owns one of the really<br />
big casino operations. He's on Forbes list of top 100 wealthiest<br />
Americans.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sure he only uses union labor.<br />
<br />
David: I'm sure he does, absolutely. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's how he got where he is.<br />
<br />
David: We've crossed paths with some interesting people in different ways.<br />
There was another one I was thinking of. Actually, this is jumping<br />
around a little bit. Editorial, in different people submitting<br />
articles and then some people I would ask would you do something<br />
for us early, early on. That's another thing we went to. I went to<br />
comic cons and the sci-fi cons to promote the magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was early.<br />
<br />
David: That was early, very early. I've got to tell you one little<br />
incident there. I also went to small press publisher conventions. I<br />
went to one over Labor Day weekend, and I don't know what year it<br />
was. It was probably '75, '76 maybe. The place that they gave this<br />
small press to exhibit was one platform up in the subway under<br />
Lincoln Center.<br />
Lincoln Center, of course, huge, but down one level is not shops.<br />
There may be a few shops but it was a big, open platform. That's<br />
where we were exhibiting. I had my magazines out there on a table<br />
and I was talking to these other underground publishers and so on,<br />
typical.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's why they put you there. It's underground.<br />
<br />
David: Underground, yes. It was a Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Saturday,<br />
Sunday, Monday. I said, "I can't be here on Sunday." Talked to the<br />
person next to me and I said, "I'm just going to leave a cigar box<br />
that says put your money in the box." He said, "You're nuts. We're<br />
in a New York subway system. You're going to come back with nothing<br />
in your box." I left a bunch of change in it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: And your ex-wife said you were too trusting.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] Yes. I left like 15 single dollar bills in there so people<br />
could make change and I just left it there, from Saturday to Monday<br />
and I came back Monday, about $40, $50 in the box. I don't know<br />
whether it paid for everything that was taken but it worked out<br />
fine. Yes, I was obviously too trusting, but at roughly the same<br />
time there was something going on. I think it was a sci-fi<br />
convention or world future society. Yeah, it was world future<br />
society convention.<br />
They had some notable people there. I was sitting down with Alvin<br />
Toffler in the lobby of the Colosseum and along comes over to us<br />
Isaac [inaudible 00:27:03] (ED: from context, they are talking about<br />
Isaac Asimov). What a wonderful little party. We had some coffee in<br />
the Colosseum and I said, "Isaac, can you write me an article?"<br />
"I got a good story from the robot series that hasn't been widely<br />
used or published and you can use that." So I got an early <br />
contribution from Isaac [inaudible 00:27:27] and Alvin<br />
Toffler wrote something for us.<br />
<br />
Anyway, got to know some interesting people at that point. Then who<br />
should submit an article, and by this time Betsy was the editor...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Out of transom comes an article from Michael Creighton. It was a<br />
program. I can't remember what it was about.<br />
<br />
David: For the Apple.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was a program for the Apple, but it was something really dumb.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know if you remember, we were reminded when Harry Garland<br />
was up at the thing in Seattle. Harry Garland was one of the first<br />
ones to produce an independent manufactured a board, a 100 bus<br />
board, for the Altair, and this was really early, and he called it<br />
the TV Dazzler. It made little squares light up but he could make<br />
lots of them light up in different colors or just a few. It was a<br />
silly program but people said we can do graphics on this.<br />
He eventually developed it into quite an interesting graphics tool,<br />
I guess. People did buy the TV Dazzler for itself but the purpose<br />
was here's a board you could produce graphics, do some graphics. In<br />
any event, that's essentially what Michael Creighton's program did<br />
for the Apple. Not much.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This was not early on.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, it was after the Apple 2 was out.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was probably...<br />
<br />
David: '80.<br />
<br />
Betsy: 1980, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you publish it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. I rejected it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: I'm like we're going to reject an article from Michael Creighton?<br />
<br />
Betsy: We both liked Michael Creighton as an article.<br />
<br />
David: Oh my gosh. But we did. We really did. We had standards.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Later on, though, he wrote something. It was better. It wasn't<br />
great. He did write something better and we did accept it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Orson Scott Card wrote for Compute, I think. I don't know if he was<br />
Orson Scott Card at that point, but [inaudible 00:30:00] .<br />
<br />
David: We've crossed paths with some people.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [inaudible 00:30:09] was actually very nice<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, 6 foot 8, big guy. He was very nice. Unfortunately, he died.<br />
On the other end of things, early on, we really were...this was<br />
probably even before Betsy got in...kind of in the small press<br />
underground publishing movement as much as in the legitimate big<br />
magazines, because that's kind of where I started.<br />
<br />
Betsy: When I came, we had just published the first sleek, coated paper<br />
magazine and coated stock. In October 1978, I believe, that was<br />
published. That was the first of the coated stock. That was kind of<br />
the bridge to legitimacy.<br />
<br />
David: For the first two years, [inaudible 00:31:09] news print and I had<br />
a little tie in with some of the small press people. I was learning<br />
about publishing from small press review, I got to know some of the<br />
people who were doing successful publishing. A lot of them were<br />
magazines and comics out of San Francisco.<br />
So I got to know a little bit [inaudible 00:31:46] and Gilbert<br />
Shelton and Sherry Flannigan, and some of those early, Bobby<br />
London. So anyway, one ad we ran real early on was an adaptation of<br />
Renee and Robert Crompton. Go ahead and change my thing to creative<br />
computing. Go for it. Sherry Flannigan she did a comic strip called<br />
Tronch and Bonnie, Tronch was a little dog and Bonnie was a little<br />
girl and they occasionally got mixed up with a robot dog.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there some sort of falling out with that person?<br />
<br />
David: With Sherry? No. I'm still friends with her on Facebook. They had a<br />
major, major problem, she was involved with Gary Hallgrin and I<br />
forget who the publisher was, McNeil, Bobby London. They were the<br />
Air Pirates funniest group that Disney took to task, that caused<br />
the death of a lot of publishing in the underground comics<br />
movement.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I don't understand.<br />
<br />
David: Air Pirates were funny, they were just looking for trouble. They<br />
had Disney characters flying planes and getting into all kinds of<br />
trouble and getting into problems that Disney characters never<br />
would have done, sexual problems as well as just acting badly.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Disney just said, "We can't put up with this." It was an<br />
interesting case, because was it a copyright violation, not really<br />
because they were character look-a-likes, but they weren't calling<br />
them Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck but they looked the same or very<br />
similar. But, it was a landmark case in underground comics, it<br />
caused a lot of them to pull back, a lot on the satire and stuff<br />
that they were publishing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I asked about Sherry because a number of years ago when I had first<br />
put the best of [inaudible 00:34:29] on my website, then after a<br />
while I got an email saying, "Look, you have to take this<br />
[inaudible 00:34:37] ." I would copyright all, it was just like<br />
waving arms. So I took it down but it was, I thought, maybe it<br />
was...<br />
<br />
David: Well that whole copyright trademark thing, there interpretation<br />
that really, really strict...everything that goes on the Internet<br />
is a public domain. Well, that is not really true either. Are you<br />
making money from copyrighted material? If you are then that's a<br />
pretty clear violation. Are you affecting the copyright owners<br />
ability to make money with it? That's a violation.<br />
I'm kind of in this right now with Uruguay and TinTin, those books<br />
have inspired a lot of people to make parodies and fake TinTin<br />
covers. TinTin at the beach, places TinTin wouldn't normally go.<br />
Well is it affecting the sales of TinTin books, or is it actually<br />
increasingly them?<br />
<br />
Casterman, who owns and [inaudible 00:36:07] owns the TinTin<br />
copyrights. They are really going after some of these people, but<br />
I'm not sure that they have a really good case. So some people take<br />
everything off and don't want nothing on the website. And others<br />
are saying, "Hey, this is legitimate." I have collected a lot of<br />
those covers, and put them up on a website.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I guess you'll find out soon enough.<br />
<br />
David: I will find out, soon enough.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They may not be right legally, but how hard do you want to fight<br />
it.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: I think that they have to demonstrate that it's hurting them in<br />
some way. One last thing, from the question you asked yesterday,<br />
back to the money issue, when I sold the magazine, right at that<br />
time I took 15 percent of what I had received, and donated it to<br />
charities. I have in a sense signed on, although not as an official<br />
signee to the Gates-Buffet initiative to give away half of my<br />
wealth, while I am alive.<br />
At one point in time you can compute that, I have already given<br />
away more than I have received for Creative Computing to Charity.<br />
Of course, it had grown a little bit and we made reasonably decent<br />
investments and that is why it continued to grow. But, I'm really<br />
committed to doing that. My kids are not going to inherit it all.<br />
That's just the way it is, that is the way I believe. Put my money<br />
where my heart is. Anyway,<br />
<br />
Kevin: Other question is, you said something yesterday, I should follow up<br />
that one. You said something about stealing Basic.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well there was this big thing. Just the night before last, at this<br />
dinner we went to, where all the people who were at the first MITS<br />
conference and they referred to the letter that Bill Gates wrote.<br />
<br />
Kevin: "Why are you stealing my software?"<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well exactly. That was just a reference to that Bill Gates, which<br />
had just been brought back to my memory by that. People were<br />
telling stories at this. Instead of having an after dinner speaker<br />
they were just passing the mic around and people were talking about<br />
incidents and things from the past.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you get to sell the story to this group of...?<br />
<br />
David: Not really, I was just followed up on something [inaudible<br />
00:39:24] .<br />
<br />
Betsy: Some of those stories were really boring.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: Oh yeah, long and boring. It's an interesting thing though, about<br />
basic itself, but it was developed at an educational institution<br />
originally by Kemeny and Kurtz at Dartmouth. And they, either<br />
deliberately or because they had gotten a lot of grant money from<br />
General Electric in the early time sharing systems, they basically<br />
let anybody use their Basic.<br />
It was developed at Dartmouth but later Honeywell put a system in<br />
at Minnesota or Florida or someplace else. They could use Basic,<br />
they could have a no license fee or anything. That made Basic a<br />
universal language that was available, at least that version of<br />
Basic. If you write a different version of Basic, where does that<br />
fall? These are some sort of violation and you need some<br />
permission. And basically Kemeny and Kurtz said, "No, you don't."<br />
And they allowed Basic to be used and developed by others.<br />
<br />
Digital Equipment, at the same time, maybe even earlier, but<br />
roughly the same time, had developed also an interactive language<br />
called Focal. And Focal in many regards was more efficient than<br />
Basic, because they were running it on many computer and there was<br />
less memory to work with. On the other hand, and this was true<br />
Digital...as time went on, they said, "No, nobody can use Focal. We<br />
are not going to let, especially those people [inaudible 00:41:59]<br />
." But any place else, nobody could use Focal.<br />
<br />
I think it wound up with a situation like Sony and Betamax. Sony<br />
saying, "Betamax is ours and it is a better format that VHS," which<br />
it was. But then, JVC saying, "We have VHS and Toshiba. Hey do you<br />
want to use it? Fine, we'll license it to you for next to nothing."<br />
<br />
Kevin: You think Focal could have been Basic.<br />
<br />
David: I think it could have been very big. I think it could there could<br />
have been very serious competition between the two languages, but<br />
by Digital limiting it only to their own computers and specifically<br />
to their mini computers, not even the big mainframes, it really<br />
limited the spread of Focal. In fact, it forced me to go out to the<br />
developers and people in educational institutions they wanted<br />
Basic.<br />
There were few schools and colleges in Boston area, near DEC that<br />
were OK with Focal. But stuff was getting published by Minnesota<br />
Educational Computer Consortium and others in Basic, [inaudible<br />
00:43:32] computer project. So they wanted Basic. [laughs] I had to<br />
go on. I hired one group, actually it turned out to be just an<br />
individual guy in Brooklyn that developed a Basic for 4KPDP8. Well<br />
Basic took 3.5K, I gave you 500 words, 512 bit not even the 16 bit,<br />
at least get 2 bits per...but 500 words the right programs. Wasn't<br />
much.<br />
<br />
So that forced Lunar Lander and [inaudible 00:44:15] and some of<br />
those programs actually. Some of them I imported over from Focal<br />
into Basic. And then we had a machine that had 8K. We had a<br />
different version of Basic because Hewlett Packard had a machine<br />
that read cards, mark sense cards. We had to have a different<br />
version of basic for that. Then we had a timeshare Basic. We had<br />
six versions of Basic, five actually on the PDP8 family. It was<br />
absurd, it was crazy, but we had to do it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I was going to ask you, the process of like...you started<br />
saying...you interrupted yourself. You said, "People would submit<br />
articles and then..." I don't know what you were going to say next.<br />
But [inaudible 00:45:08] that I wanted to ask you like just the<br />
process of how the magazine got made. You got an article was,<br />
somebody just typed up or something and...<br />
<br />
Betsy: You mean the mechanics of the production?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We can receive most of the articles for the magazine came over the<br />
transom. And we would get these articles and our editorial system<br />
would log them in and pass them around to editorial staff. John<br />
Anderson and Russell [inaudible 00:45:42] .<br />
<br />
David: Peter Fee.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Peter Fee.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What does it mean over the transom?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Means they weren't solicited. Somebody in the middle of the night<br />
jumped to know [laughs] or through the mailbox. We put a little<br />
piece of paper on there and the guys would write their opinions.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] That is serious.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Some of the things they said. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Like what? What would they say?<br />
<br />
Betsy: "Don't quit your day job." [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: And then they had the rubber stamp.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Somebody found a stamp. Everything that we had was used, including<br />
our desk and everything. And somebody found, at the back of the<br />
desk, a stamp. It said San Marcos on it. This was like the ultimate<br />
insult. [laughs] San Marcos, like you know, "Get out of here."<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Send it to San Marcos?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Send it to San Marcos, wherever that was. Ultimately, I would make<br />
the final decision whether we were going to publish this or not.<br />
Once we were well established, the vast majority of them went back.<br />
We never returned manuscripts. And they would come with piles of<br />
code. A lot of them were programs and, we would decide and the<br />
editorial assistants job to notify the person. Then we bought all<br />
rights, didn't we?<br />
<br />
David: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
Betsy: North American Serial rights, that's what we bought for everything.<br />
Then they would go into a cube. Sometimes we would say something,<br />
"Oh, this is going to go really well with this educational<br />
institute that we're doing in June," Like that one is for June or<br />
just put it in the queue and we will see when it comes or rises to<br />
the top or whatever.<br />
The more technical editors like, John Anderson, he was our best guy<br />
ever. They would go through the code and make sure the code worked,<br />
and I would edit them for content and correct them.<br />
<br />
David: For English and Grammar.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, with a pen and pencil. Then they would go to our typesetter.<br />
Typesetter would correct them. And then they would come back, and I<br />
think, our lower level editorial assistant would proofread them,<br />
but proofread a lot of them too. When they came out typesetter, it<br />
was on a smooth shiny paper.<br />
<br />
David: Photographic paper.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And then, if they had screenshots or anything the art department<br />
would make them into photo stats or [inaudible 00:49:02] . And then<br />
when it was time for them to go to press they would put them on<br />
boards, pieces of cardboard, white paper...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So you paste up?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, they do the paste up and put it on there.<br />
<br />
David: The boards were using non reproducing blue on its photograph. They<br />
had different outlines, blue defined columns, both two and three<br />
column pages and upper limits and page numbers and all that kind of<br />
stuff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: We were still doing it on [inaudible 00:49:43] newspaper in 1990.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well that's exactly it, so you know what we're talking about. And<br />
then once you get it all together and then again somebody has got<br />
to read it to make sure there is no lines left out, particularly of<br />
the programs. Make sure that those all still make sense. There were<br />
many cases where line got left out or artists cuts off a things and<br />
realizes, "Oh, I mean to cut it short." And that whole line<br />
disappears and then you send it off to be printed and all the<br />
subscribers get a little upset because Startrek doesn't run.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: So that sort of thing happened frequently or often?<br />
<br />
David: With typeset material, not much at all. But with program listings,<br />
program listings were really tough. Because you would have people<br />
that would submit something, and they'd have a really cheap, low-<br />
end dot matrix printer. And we always encouraged people, if you're<br />
going to submit a program, submit it in some machine-readable form.<br />
So we don't want to type them all in to make sure they work. Even<br />
though our readers are going to have to, but we don't want to have<br />
to do that. So send us. But even so, we might then print it off on<br />
one of our slightly higher end printers. But I'll tell you what,<br />
you have page breaks and everything else. And the Art department<br />
didn't have a clue about programs and stuff. The program would get<br />
stated down. We weren't using the full sized type for program<br />
listings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. At that point we hadn't the ability to make them fit.<br />
<br />
David: That's where the most common place that you'd lose a line or<br />
something. It would get photographed, and when it's coming out of a<br />
line printer, you might have one or two lines on the following<br />
page. "Oh, we forgot that."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Personally, I know it said so much about magazine that when it<br />
continued, there were just sometimes a handwritten area going,<br />
"Continued over here." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Oh, absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was a early.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It wasn't professional, and that was awesome. It was just like,<br />
"OK."<br />
<br />
Betsy: Then what we would do, we would request when we...we would solicit<br />
articles. Like if there was a new Apple peripheral that we wanted<br />
to review, we'd get the product. Then a lot of times, our own guys<br />
wanted to review the stuff, but if it was something that we didn't<br />
have time for, or that was better suited to one of our freelancers,<br />
we would send it out and ask for a review of it.<br />
A lot of reviews came in over the transom too, but we tried to be<br />
careful of those, that they were not either trying to justify their<br />
own purchase of whatever it was or get even with the publisher for<br />
producing it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Or written by the... [crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: That really wasn't an issue at the time, it was a more innocent<br />
time. That really didn't happen much, but it was, sometimes, people<br />
would get a product they didn't care for and totally bash it, then<br />
we have to go and figure out is it really that bad. We tend to not<br />
produce seriously negative...if it was a really bad product we just<br />
ignored it.<br />
<br />
David: We tried to be objective with reviews, but before I got into the<br />
computer field at all I was in market research. There are a number<br />
of biases, too, that really overwhelmingly affect all kinds of<br />
market research polls or surveys. One is that people think they're<br />
better than they are. For example, if we were doing a poll or a<br />
research study, we'd put a question on basically designed to show<br />
the executives who were using this data that there were some<br />
biases.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He's not talking about Creative Computing.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: No, no. This was way earlier. I'm talking about Proctor and Gamble<br />
products or general foods or that kind of thing. Anyways, the<br />
question we put on was "please rank your driving ability," and we<br />
had from well below average, accident waiting to happen up to Mario<br />
Andretti, Danica Patrick, over there. And you know what, 99 percent<br />
of the population ranked themselves better than the average. Where<br />
is your average then? Its way high.<br />
The other thing, equally pervasive in a sense, is that people<br />
wanted to justify a decision, a purchase decision. In fact, back<br />
the 30s, the slogan for Ford Motor Company was ask a man that owns<br />
one. You ask a man that owns and has made a decision to buy this<br />
car, he's going to say "Yeah, it is the greatest car." So you put<br />
on questions, again, throwaway questions.<br />
<br />
If you had this, or if you were an owner of whatever car it is that<br />
you have. "What do you have now? Would you buy another one?" People<br />
"Oh, yes. This is a great decision. I love this car." I'll tell you<br />
where you can find out, is you look at what percentage of people<br />
that did own that particular car did buy another one? They're<br />
always way lower than they those that say they would buy another<br />
one. It gets more pronounced with higher prices.<br />
<br />
If you've made a decision to buy a high-priced car, you're going to<br />
think, "I'll tell you what. This Land Rover was the best car I have<br />
ever bought." 78 percent of people might say, "I'm going to buy<br />
another one." About 15 percent of the people actually do.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So [inaudible 00:56:49] magazine because people want to justify a<br />
review.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. That's exactly right. And as Betsy said, it could go the<br />
other way, too. "I think I'm getting screwed here with this product<br />
and I'm going to knock it." When you get reviews, in essence, over<br />
the transom, they're either justifying, "This was really wonderful.<br />
I made a great decision buying this particular product," or "I hate<br />
it." It's hard to know whether the review was really objective and<br />
realistic.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you ever push-back from advertisers?<br />
<br />
David: All the time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Can you tell me?<br />
<br />
Betsy: We would feel the pushback from our ad sales people. They would say<br />
"So and so is annoyed with you because you didn't put it." We very<br />
rarely put anybody's totally negative reviews, but we tried to be<br />
objective, and not every product is perfect. Almost every product<br />
is going to have some negative feature.<br />
We would put those in and the advertisers would then go to their ad<br />
rep and complain. Then the ad rep would come to us and say, "Why<br />
are you doing this? These people are mad. I have to sell them ads."<br />
We would just say "Separation of church and State. You are<br />
advertising in this magazine because it's a credible magazine, and<br />
if we let you push us around, it won't be credible anymore, and<br />
then it will reflect on your ad."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you remember anyone ever pulling ads [inaudible 00:58:39] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't, offhand. Do you?<br />
<br />
David: No, but I can tell you the opposite. There were a couple of<br />
magazines that almost ran manufactured press releases as product<br />
reviews. They did get more advertising than we did from some<br />
manufacturers that liked that. I hate to name names, but Compute<br />
Magazine. I don't think you'll find any negative reviews in Compute<br />
Magazine. Everything was the greatest thing since sliced bread.<br />
Personal Computing, similar, very positive. "Gee whiz" reviews on<br />
almost all the things that they saw. It just isn't that way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You have talked about [inaudible 00:59:49] . We've talked briefly<br />
at least about the other magazines. Sync, the one about Timex<br />
Sinclair. I understand the allure of publishing a magazine geared<br />
to a specific system, but why did you pick Timex Sinclair? [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Probably two reasons. One is that we had more of a presence in<br />
England than most of the other magazines.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Still do.<br />
<br />
David: We had a very early agreement with David Tebbet, who was the co-<br />
publisher of Personal Computer, something-or-other. It might have<br />
been Personal Computer World. Yes, it was.<br />
<br />
Betsy Ahi: Yes it was Personal Computer World, and when PC world started they<br />
had to call it PC World because there was already a Personal<br />
Computer World in England.<br />
<br />
David: And we had an agreement that they would reprint materials from<br />
Creative Computing, which they did for a while but then they<br />
developed their own in-house capabilities and there was enough<br />
differences. We went to England and very early on had an agent in<br />
England that we could take subscriptions.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A housewife who kept her back issues in her spare bathroom.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we still know her. Hazel Greaves, Hazy. Anyway, so we were<br />
getting enough subscriptions from England. We were sending over, I<br />
don't know how they packaged them up, but they call them Mbags, M-<br />
bags, mail bags basically of magazines, then we mail them from<br />
England. So I had more of our connection with British market than<br />
probably any of the other magazines, we definitely did.<br />
And so I get to know Clarkson Clair and what's going on over there.<br />
And then when they bring over the computer to this country and<br />
Timex, my God, big outfit. They were going to market it. By that<br />
time you know, there was no point starting a [inaudible 01:02:25]<br />
magazine or an entire magazine. They were, Or Apple, they were<br />
already existed. So maybe this is going to be the next big one. We<br />
will be right there when they start and we were.<br />
<br />
Timex actually put, what we had simple, simple sink or something<br />
but it was in the package with the computer. So that was one way of<br />
getting our subscriber base and we couldn't possibly afford to<br />
advertise and do direct mailings for magazine like that. But they<br />
were in essence helping us go on. So that's why it is pretty<br />
successful actually. Often, we were making money on the magazine<br />
mainly because we didn't have to promote it.<br />
<br />
If we had to get subscriptions, we could not have possibly made it<br />
work. There wasn't enough advertising really. I don't know what the<br />
issue here was, but it was not as good as we would have liked it.<br />
The magazine would have been tiny if we maintained the same<br />
advertising to edit ratio we would have liked. But we didn't lose<br />
money out of it but we didn't make anything out of it either. I<br />
think it was a breakeven proposition.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Microsystems. [inaudible 01:04:09] .<br />
<br />
David: I said there was a lot of early development in New Jersey and there<br />
was a guy named Saul Libes, you will find him probably, [laughs]<br />
who was the first president of the Amature Computer Group in New<br />
Jersey. He was a Professor at [inaudible 01:04:43] College and he<br />
felt that Byte magazine started out fine but then they were<br />
focusing more on assembled hardware and things that were already<br />
made.<br />
So he wanted to get down on really lower level of do it yourself,<br />
build it yourself. Microsystems was more like Byte was in the very<br />
beginning, focusing on circuit diagram, this was logic in PC's and<br />
everything.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There first name was S100, Microsystems<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, S100 perhaps then it became Microsystems in '78 or '79. When<br />
some of the others came out they started [inaudible 01:05:45] 6800<br />
and 68,000 chips from Motorola. But I would say it was a really<br />
techy magazine and it was one that I think probably killed that one<br />
off.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was dead before [inaudible 01:06:05] . [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: It might have been. I don't know, but it was...<br />
<br />
Betsy: S100 bus did not survive and to the [inaudible 01:06:12] .<br />
<br />
David: It was dead before as there was these eras and the do it yourself<br />
S100 era,that was '75 to '78. Then it kind of had a downward spiral<br />
of two or three years and it was gone. Well, maybe it wasn't gone<br />
but it wasn't the same. And so Microsystems was tuned into that and<br />
they were running hardcore stuff.<br />
And the reason that Saul...we reach an agreement with him to<br />
publish it, is basically he didn't have any real magazine<br />
background. We thought we could do something with it. It turned out<br />
not to be a good fit bit we published it for a while. I don't know<br />
if we made money or lost money on that. Probably it didn't make<br />
anything. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Small business computers or computing.<br />
<br />
David: What?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Small business computers? Who do we buy that from? I can't even<br />
remember. You can't even remember that we had it, I can tell by the<br />
look on your face<br />
<br />
David: I can<br />
<br />
Betsy: That one of my brothers...my brother was a publisher remember?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I don't know who or where we got it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That just fall into grave or...?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Eventually, but that we post it for a while. I think is something<br />
that somebody basically left on our door step.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think it was kind of like a puppy on the... [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: I think it came with your brother.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, because my brother wasn't into publishing until after clearing<br />
college.<br />
<br />
David: It sounded like a good idea at the time.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think we saw a future in business computing<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we did and unfortunately that was one word as if they just<br />
want...I mentioned yesterday that they wanted to really shift the<br />
focus of Creative Computing away from home and broaden out and<br />
shifted into the small business market. And just did not, it was an<br />
uncomfortable fit. We would've been better to have a separate<br />
magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember where we got Small Business Computing from or<br />
where it went.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know, either.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But I know that obviously it wasn't a huge acquisition.<br />
<br />
David: It was a footnote.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A footnote in the story. [laughs]<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Actually, a bigger acquisition was earlier and that was ROM<br />
Magazine. Rom was published by who? (ED: not the Atari-related<br />
magazine of the early 1980s.)<br />
<br />
Betsy: Erik Sandberg-Diment.<br />
<br />
David: Right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: D-I-M-E-N-T.<br />
<br />
David: Connecticut. He did a nice job with the magazine, very nice job<br />
with it. Published nine issues and a little different focus than<br />
Creative but it really overlapped us very nicely. He had more<br />
graphic stuff. In fact, it was through him that I got to know<br />
George Baker and some of the people up there. The other guy that<br />
did the pixelated blocks photos. You've seen those.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The Einstein.<br />
<br />
David: [crosstalk] The Lincoln with block pics.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Block pics.<br />
<br />
David: Block pics. OK, he and George Baker sort of came as a package with<br />
Rom, they knew of each other. We actually, I would say, four or<br />
five issues, ran Rom as a whole separate section and even set it on<br />
the cover of Creative Computing and Rom. Then it became evident...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think that was because he had a whole other editorial kicking<br />
around. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We bought.<br />
<br />
David: Could be. And then we would just merge it in completely, but that<br />
was a very good fit. It brought us more editorial than it did<br />
subscribers. They did not have a big subscriber base, but it was a<br />
nice marriage in a sense.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Video and Arcade Games only published I think four issues.<br />
<br />
David: Three.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Three?<br />
<br />
David: Actually, three but if you've got a hold of the third one, you're<br />
doing well. I think Ziff cut that off after two real issues got<br />
mailed out. We did a third one but it wasn't sent out to<br />
subscribers.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My website only has two issues.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. There were only two that really were distributed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So I have...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: A goal. [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, if you can get a hold of the third one. [laughter] I don't<br />
even have that. There's a same thing on Atarian. There were three<br />
issues of Atarian that I did not keep the third issue. Oh, man.<br />
Shoot me.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: But Video and Arcade Games, there were at least five or six other<br />
magazines focusing on that. Talk about magazines that were running<br />
non-objective manufacture-provided reviews, all the others were. I,<br />
maybe, convinced myself and some people at Davis that there was a<br />
need for really objective...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ziff? Did Ziff do that?<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Were we with Ziff when we did that?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah. That was a late one. So we said, let's...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Continue it through.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, that was definitely. Let's do it. But again...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not only that but it was going to be fun.<br />
<br />
David: It was going to be a lot of fun. [laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: So why did it fail?<br />
<br />
David: OK, again you got to look at the eras and what was happening.<br />
Arcade games then really were on the decline. Video arcades where<br />
you go in and pop a quarter in, because there was so much more<br />
capability in the home computers and the [inaudible 01:12:55] and<br />
the Mattel and the different home systems. They could do all now,<br />
not as much, but you get a pretty darned good game that you could<br />
take home with you and not have to pop a quarter in the slot every<br />
time you play.<br />
So arcade games were kind of on the downward spiral, so that<br />
eliminated a lot of potential advertising. We weren't going to get<br />
any advertising from Nameco and all of the producers of the arcade<br />
games, which was, "Hey, it is advertising along with..." And the<br />
other home producers of the game, there were four or five magazines<br />
already that they were pouring money into. They didn't really want<br />
another one.<br />
<br />
So it was advertising that or just lack of advertising that killed<br />
that off. We just couldn't get it. I think there was still a need<br />
for what we had sort of in a sense proposed to do of objectively<br />
reviewing games and secondly, we're telling people how to play<br />
them.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, it was strategies.<br />
<br />
David: Strategies. It was advertising that we just didn't have, couldn't<br />
get.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:14:28] Atari explored and Atari I think we've covered<br />
pretty well.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Military vehicles, which we talked about.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] Yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So the other magazines, Byte and [inaudible 01:14:45] , was it<br />
rivalry? Was it friendly competition?<br />
<br />
David: Byte, we were in bed together. Not in bed together, but we<br />
published the best of Byte. Creative Computing did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: For awhile.<br />
<br />
David: Well, just one.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. That wasn't that friendly a rivalry. It wasn't that friendly<br />
after awhile.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't friendly once they sold to McGraw Hill, and they sold<br />
early. Then everything was off. We did some joint promotions with<br />
Byte for hardware creative software. We ran the ads for each other<br />
for a short time.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's when McGraw Hill cutoff.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] In a heartbeat. No more of that.<br />
<br />
David: We felt that basically we weren't even competing for the same<br />
advertisers. Just a few, but not really. Certainly, we were not in<br />
direct competition at all with Byte. So that was just kind of all<br />
in the same place and you're going in a hardware direction, we're<br />
going on the software.<br />
When Wayne Green threw this intrigue with his wife and everything<br />
else, lost Byte Magazine. He was fit to be tied. "I'm going to kill<br />
them!" and he started Kilobyte. It wasn't killable. It was Kilobyte<br />
for I don't know how many issues.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not many.<br />
<br />
David: 1000 bytes. [laughter] and a kilobyte, it had a dual meaning there.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: That was a ferocious and very nasty. Oh, horrible rivalry. Somebody<br />
early on forced him not to use the name byte at all.<br />
<br />
Betsy: So it was byte.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: So they changed it to Kilobaud.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Which didn't mean anything.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: No.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So did you have a relationship with Wayne?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Nobody had a relationship with... [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Nobody really had a relationship. I knew him, of course. He was<br />
going his own way. Now the one area actually where we got into more<br />
competition with him than in the magazine itself, because again, he<br />
was trying to be like Byte, hardware oriented and he published 73<br />
magazines so he was basically focusing on the ham radio people, the<br />
do it yourselfers and so on. But they started a software division.<br />
It was pretty good. They had a lot of the same types of software<br />
that we did on cassette tape.<br />
In any event, we really had more of a head to head rivalry on the<br />
software than in the magazine publishing. We never really had<br />
anything to do with the magazine products or books. They also<br />
published some books but more like the magazine hardware type of<br />
thing. We weren't quite as selective, but our book publishing we<br />
did get into things that weren't in the magazine. We published<br />
books with more of a hardware orientation. We had a little broader<br />
line of books than the type of things that we had in the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I don't know if you want to open this can of worms, but you said to<br />
me in an email, "You couldn't find two people whose vision,<br />
philosophy, ethics, and view of business and life was further apart<br />
than Wayne and I." Can you elaborate on that? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was just basically unpleasant, is my take on him. I didn't know<br />
him that well but it was just sort of like he had a chip on his<br />
shoulder and was daring you to knock it off. Wouldn't you say?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You knew him before I did but by the time I arrived on the scene<br />
that was just sort of the general industry perception of him, I<br />
think. It was just stay away from him, leave him alone, he's not<br />
very nice.<br />
<br />
David: Well, one other thing, which we sort of touched on a couple of<br />
times, I'm very trusting. [laughter] Overly so, according to my ex-<br />
wife and I think there would be a couple of examples. Wayne would<br />
walk out of that door, boy, out of sight, 'you're going to do<br />
something to screw him' is what his view would be. He did not trust<br />
anybody.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] And least of all, his ex wife.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: It's the old saying, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean<br />
that somebody isn't out to get you." He thought everyone was out to<br />
get him, everybody. So we were totally philosophically different.<br />
Our ways of doing business were different. I shake hands with you,<br />
we have an agreement. You don't shake hands with Wayne.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't think his employees were ever happy either.<br />
<br />
David: Oh!<br />
<br />
Betsy: You talked to them and it shows. He didn't have like a great...<br />
<br />
David: Rapport.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well it was not. The culture of his organization I don't think was<br />
particularly, I think it was probably permeated with this lack of<br />
trust.<br />
<br />
David: Well, one thing, we had fun. We really did have fun at Creative<br />
Computing. Perhaps some of the editorial staff, too much. There was<br />
one point where Betsy had to away their...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well they were all young guys. Some of them even still in high<br />
school, they would play games for hours and hours and hours, long<br />
after the reviews were done. It was one, self-contained thing that<br />
played football, and they played it for hours. I had to take it<br />
away from them. Like "don't make me be your mother"<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there any drug culture at all? If you read [inaudible 01:22:17]<br />
and he was cocaine and high everyday and popped...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not that we knew of. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: The East coast was quite different.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No there was nothing, really. I don't think so. In fact, my client<br />
John Anderson and Peter Fee, they were actually kind of protective<br />
of me in a lot of ways. I can remember being in John's office and<br />
they were talking about a movie or something like that. John said,<br />
"No, you wouldn't like this movie, don't go to this movie." That<br />
kind of thing, they were funny guys. They just kept laughing. David<br />
Lubar. They were free spirits but they were very funny, talented<br />
guys.<br />
<br />
David: He is coming out with a line of children's books, weird, weird<br />
stuff. The last one, something about the lawn mower weenies. He has<br />
a line of 6 or 8, and they're all little short stories. Some of<br />
them were adaptations of stuff that almost got published in<br />
Creative Computing, probably some of them did. Lubar is a funny<br />
guy. When he left and went to work for one of the video gaming<br />
companies, his first big successful game was "Worm Wars." You were<br />
like, "Worm Wars?" [laughs]<br />
Other people are fighting real serious warrior and you are fighting<br />
with worms. We just had a different kind of culture, a lot of fun.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Jonny Anderson went to work for A+ in San Francisco. He was one<br />
of the five people killed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1986.<br />
He was in a car and a piece of the building fell on the car. He was<br />
a really funny guy.<br />
<br />
David: We did not have a serious business culture.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, we had this great big room with a bunch of tables set up around<br />
the edges, in the middle. It was kind of like that, nowhere near as<br />
neat.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I will clean that up for you.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] Just tangles of wires, and we had to have one of every<br />
kind of computer so we can test all the software, and this one<br />
would be running this kind of peripheral, and it was like a young<br />
guys dream job.<br />
<br />
David: You commented yesterday about how we had a bunch of high school,<br />
not quite, but still...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I said that they were in their early 20s but they basically had the<br />
maturity of high school students, they needed a little bit of<br />
mothering. But I wasn't that myself. They were just really nice<br />
guys, we did a good job hiring those kids.<br />
<br />
David: When you talk about the Atari cultures and some of the others,<br />
where every Friday some of these companies have parties, that kind<br />
of thing. We had an annual party, a picnic. We didn't need weekly<br />
parties and stuff to let you have fun because that stuff was going<br />
on every day, not really partying but playing the games and<br />
bantering and everything else.<br />
As they say, at Washington, a real efficient business culture.<br />
Heck, I didn't work for Digital Equipment, which was still a pretty<br />
relaxed place, but AT&T which was anything but. This is as far away<br />
from that kind of corporate culture as you can get, but it worked.<br />
Didn't make a lot of money, but it worked.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:26:58]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. And I think they appreciated it because they weren't making<br />
tons of money either, but they were having a lot of fun. They<br />
enjoyed going to work, they really enjoyed it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Speaking of Kindle, I've done it but haven't told anybody yet that<br />
best of Creative Computing too is now available on Kindle. And I<br />
have been working backwards. [crosstalk] I just had it on sale.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I haven't publicized it yet for sale.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They won't let you do. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah, I think they will have two.<br />
<br />
David: Did you do that through Amazon? How do you convert is to Kindle?<br />
I scan them and then I do CRM and I use Elance or utilize some<br />
service in India that converts it back to ASCII, and then they<br />
convert it into an E-book from there. It's a lot of work, I want it<br />
done well, and I want it to be super awesome. And they just<br />
[inaudible 01:28:40] , like we were talking about before.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Outsourcing and stuff. But I can do it myself but that would take<br />
way too long. So I just try to do the quality control [inaudible<br />
01:28:49] . It's not perfect but better than nothing.<br />
<br />
David: I have reached the point where with my Dodge restoration book, that<br />
yes, many of the borders around the pictures are terrible, they're<br />
hand drawn and so on. But I'm not going to bother to re-do that, I<br />
just want take the book, get it into some sort of machine readable<br />
format, PDF or something. [inaudible 01:29:24] somebody that can...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah, I can get you off with that. We can then figure it out.<br />
<br />
David: I found one extra one that I can cut up.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That will help a lot. [inaudible 01:29:37] . If you want to sell a<br />
PDF of it, that would be up in couple of day. That's easy, but a<br />
searchable Kindle version that takes longer.<br />
<br />
David: I don't want a Kindle version because people want to print out<br />
something that they can...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Take out to the garage<br />
<br />
David: When people slide under the vehicle they have it there, "Oh, OK<br />
this is what I should be looking for."<br />
<br />
Kevin: If you scan it and upload it to Amazon, even create space from<br />
[inaudible 01:30:06] company, then there could actually be another<br />
book, that looks pretty identical to the first one. We will figure<br />
out.<br />
Do you [inaudible 01:30:23] ? But are you familiar with...?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Are there any?<br />
<br />
Kevin: There are but they are very different than Creative.<br />
<br />
David: Somebody out there said, "What did you read today?" The only<br />
magazines that I will occasionally pick up in the computer field<br />
are mostly from England, Internet magazines, well there are<br />
several, which is sort of interesting that the dominant Internet<br />
magazines come from England, but they do.<br />
If I want to do something, and I haven't lately, but I wanted to<br />
get into doing something different or interactive or something with<br />
my website. I'd pick up one of those magazines and kind of have<br />
same kind of thing that Creative used to publish. Here is a code to<br />
do it in Pearl or HTML, whatever.<br />
<br />
I converted all of my website, quite a while ago, to XHTML from old<br />
HTML. I did not like any of the programs that generate web pages,<br />
mainly because...Well, today its probably OK, but I felt that<br />
earlier on, they were very inefficient. You'd have this much code<br />
for something and XHTML would write it in five lines.<br />
<br />
My old-fashioned [inaudible 01:32:23] said, "You know what, the<br />
interpreter or compiler or whatever, has to go through a lot of<br />
that just to pick out what is going to be displayed." My web pages<br />
are very compact and short. They are all XHTML, none of that is<br />
extra [inaudible 01:32:41] style pages and everything else.<br />
<br />
Anyway, so that's what I'll pick up a magazine for. I'm was doing a<br />
little bit of programming in Pearl and then I said, "No. You know<br />
what, I can get routines that I can download and I don't have to<br />
learn it myself. I learned enough to know that I don't want your<br />
Pearl program." [laughs] Or what is the other one? I don't know.<br />
I'm right at the point now where I'm wanting to do some more things<br />
that I can't, so I'll probably purchase some more computer<br />
magazines and learn about it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Has anyone talked to you about the purchase of PC by Davis?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is a big story.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: She was involved.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was involved. There was a magazine called PC. I was in San<br />
Francisco.<br />
<br />
Kevin: PC magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: PC Magazine, right. And, there was a guy named Tony Gold and there<br />
was somebody else that I can't remember. There was Tony Gold and<br />
this Mr. X started this magazine and they hired...David Banell will<br />
probably tell you all, I don't know all the details but I'm sure he<br />
has it engraved in his brain.<br />
They hired David Banell to run it and I guess several other people,<br />
and my understanding is, that they told them they were going to<br />
give them a piece of the action, they weren't going to pay them<br />
very much but you're all part owners and everything, but nobody<br />
ever wrote it down.<br />
<br />
So when Ziff Davis approached Tony Gold and Mr. X and wanted to buy<br />
the magazine, and the guys said, "Oh yeah, sure," and they sold it<br />
to him and all these people that were working for them said, "Well,<br />
what about us. We're part owners too." But there was no proof of<br />
it. So Ziff bought it, and they were right in the middle, just<br />
about to go to press with an issue and they got word that it had<br />
been purchased by Ziff.<br />
<br />
So David Banell took just about the entire staff and they walked<br />
out and went across town and started PC World. Apparently their<br />
lawyers said, "Don't take anything with you." So they just walked<br />
out and left the offices as they were, and Ziff, who now had a<br />
magazine to get out and no one to do it, sent me out to San<br />
Francisco for a couple of weeks and there was like an editorial<br />
assistant and a couple of freelance writers, were the only people<br />
left.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So this is when you became the interim.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is how I become the editorial director of PC. So I basically<br />
went out there and walked into this office and had to pull together<br />
their issue and get it off to the printer. They had a big dummy on<br />
the wall where everthing...<br />
<br />
Kevin: They lay all the...<br />
<br />
Betsy: They lay all the impositions where all the pages and the stories<br />
were going to go and they moved everything around. [laughs] But<br />
they couldn't resist.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That is awesome.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This one guy, whose name I wish I could remember. Barry Owen,<br />
worked with me, and we were able to get it off to the printer and<br />
then pack everything up and send it back to New York and then they<br />
hired Barry Owen, he moved to New York and he eventually become the<br />
editor, because that was who they had.<br />
I was sort of the editorial director for a while and they said<br />
that, "If you were going to do this, you would have to come to the<br />
city. We are going to really set up an office here and make it<br />
real." And I said, "No, I am not going to drive into the city every<br />
day or take the train or the bus or anything." It was a interesting<br />
story and we were getting much more interesting version of it from<br />
David Barnell, who was there. [laughs]<br />
<br />
And in the mean time, they were all starting up PC World and taking<br />
all of their freelancers and trying to make it as difficult as<br />
possible for PC. That was a big rivalry, obviously.<br />
<br />
David: And then it created a couple of months of problems at creative too,<br />
because my editor was gone. I had really gotten very dependent to<br />
rely on her for so many things. "I got to edit this myself." And<br />
then the whole question mark was, OK if PC magazine, is she can<br />
stay with it. It was a time of uncertainty.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm sure it was a bad career move.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. But PC magazine still exist.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, exactly. I don't know if I would have existed if I had to<br />
commute to New York, that's a nasty commute. Millions of people do<br />
it but, I just didn't want to be one of them. I didn't mean to<br />
interrupt, so back to you.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What are you most proud of, or everything you have done?<br />
<br />
David: OK, that's obviously not a one word answer. Proud is, I am not<br />
crazy about it. I guess the fact that I continued to hear from<br />
people that said, "Hey, I got my start in computing from Basic<br />
computer games or Creative Computing," or something that I had my<br />
hand in, that makes me feel pretty good.<br />
You have a long term, or longer term influence that just what you<br />
do at the time, it's living on. It's not living on forever. Basic<br />
isn't going to live on forever. But I think the idea that having<br />
some positive influence on other people, on their lives, on their<br />
careers, that's a good.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You helped send people into the computer science field.<br />
<br />
David: And you know the specific individual accomplishments. Yeah, I wrote<br />
a couple of programs that are probably in some cases, maybe not the<br />
program but the routines, are still in use. That's minor compared<br />
to having an influence on people and their career and their<br />
outlook, their future. That's way more important. "OK so I wrote a<br />
great algorithm, so what."<br />
<br />
Kevin: And you really think it's the same algorithm that's being used in<br />
Google maps and...<br />
<br />
David: Portions of it, yeah. But that is minor. I look back and I say,<br />
"Almost anything that I wrote in the last 30-40 years, if I were<br />
doing it today, I would have done it a little differently, but I<br />
didn't know then what I know now." So there's no one thing I could<br />
say, "Oh, that was a really great article, or great insight," or<br />
something. Anything can be improved upon.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sure. That's what disappoints me about computer magazines today is<br />
I don't think that it seems like children going to be able to go.<br />
It's not going to motivate anybody to do anything, other than use<br />
Word version 18 or whatever. There's no Basic programs to type<br />
anymore and it's not exciting.<br />
[cross talk]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Well, [inaudible 01:42:31] was mentioning that at breakfast,<br />
oh gosh that was just yesterday.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was yesterday [laughs] .<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] That kids today don't have any feeling about, or I should<br />
say knowledge about the real basics of bits. What is a bit?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: Nobody knows anymore. He wanted to find some little simple piece of<br />
hardware. Really, I guess he has, that every kid when they're in<br />
the 5th or 6th grade will be exposed to this so they'll have some<br />
concept of what bits are all about. Are you ever going to get that<br />
into schools today? No. So anyway, it's just kind of, hopefully<br />
there's been some long term influence.<br />
And what I'm doing now even, which is mainly developing bible<br />
studies for...well, I mostly have guys that have had a drug or<br />
alcohol addiction problem coming to this. They're in a rescue<br />
mission. I'm hoping that these studies can have a little bit of an<br />
influence on the direction of their lives. They're a positive<br />
influence on where they go from here. So it's kind of, people more<br />
than a specific thing or whatever.<br />
<br />
[pause]<br />
<br />
Those are terrible copies.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They are copies. These are from the scans. I was printing scans and<br />
I wasn't trying to make them pretty. Just for my reasons, it was<br />
quick and dirty. I could've bumped the contrast and stuff.<br />
<br />
David: There's Carl.<br />
[pause]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do have anything left, like how many subscribers you had over time?<br />
Is that data around anymore? How many newsstand copies you had? I<br />
assume that is a lot.<br />
<br />
David: OK, maximum, I think we mentioned that. We hit just about a half a<br />
million before Ziff killed it. Then, they gave people a choice of<br />
three magazines that they expected to continue to publish, PC,<br />
Apple's A+, or Mac User.<br />
I'm guessing that most people went with PC. One of the reasons<br />
actually was Ziff's rationale at that point was, PC World had<br />
really grown a lot and the circulation base of PC World and PC were<br />
very close. They were both about a half million. PC might have had<br />
a small lead.<br />
<br />
Then, by killing Creative Computing and rolling all of those<br />
subscribers, there was some overlap. Certainly, there were some<br />
subscribers that got both magazines. You probably had a quarter of<br />
a million additional subscribers into PC. All of the sudden, they<br />
go to advertise, "We've got three-quarters of a million and PC<br />
World only has half a million."<br />
<br />
That was when PC had a huge growth spurt. You know, they started<br />
publishing those telephone-book-thick issues.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I would think that it probably still holds the record for the<br />
largest magazine ever published, whenever the issue was that they<br />
published it, it was their biggest one. Certainly magazines aren't<br />
getting bigger now. They didn't continue to increase in size after<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: Then they started publishing it twice a month. The nudge that the<br />
subscriber base at Creative, gave to PC really, separated them<br />
completely from PC World. They had their reasons.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. This is a chart of the page count of Creative Computing over<br />
its life. It's not a question, I just made a chart. Every December<br />
there's a peak for the big December issue. Right at the end it<br />
just, all of the sudden, stopped.<br />
<br />
David: Well, that's when Ziff had decided to kill it, which was almost a<br />
year before. They basically let us publish for another eight or<br />
nine months after they had made the decision.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was a lot of back and forth. Are they going to kill it? Are<br />
they not going to kill it?<br />
<br />
David: They weren't promoting, no subscription promotion. They were saving<br />
their money. If you don't promote the subscriptions, you're not<br />
going to get them.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is page count.<br />
<br />
David: It was advertising.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:48:59]<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't actually subscriber base didn't drop them. That's cool.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just thought I'd do a comparison, even though that's not really<br />
what I'm doing here. In the beginning, you guys were bimonthly and<br />
they were monthly. I couldn't know how to do it accurately. Their<br />
page count's actually higher, because they were doing twice as<br />
much. I don't have all the data here. You guys tended to publish<br />
larger issues than "Kilobyte?"<br />
<br />
David: It was so dependent upon advertising. You got some magazines, they<br />
would run 80, 90 percent advertising, if they could. In some<br />
special interest fields, you can get away with that, because people<br />
are actually buying the magazine for the advertising, not for the<br />
editorial content.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [inaudible 01:50:02] , a good example.<br />
<br />
David: That's exactly right. Even what the guys that bought Military<br />
Vehicles, they just went over so heavily to...I always believe that<br />
you should have at least one-third editorial content, preferably<br />
more. They dropped down to 20 percent to edit.<br />
<br />
Kevin: There was one issue, the 10th anniversary issue, I don't mean to be<br />
picking on Wayne here. There was this quote he happened to say,<br />
which I thought was really interesting to me, I wanted to get your<br />
take on it. He said, this is in 1984, "A computer system doesn't<br />
really stand a prayer anymore unless there's at least one<br />
dedicated, independent magazine for its users."<br />
<br />
David: Wayne said that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wayne said that. Is that true? At the time, would you have agreed<br />
with that?<br />
<br />
David: In '84? Again, you've got to look at where we were in the cycle at<br />
that point. The cycle was then, there were more computers dying off<br />
than there were new ones being released. Standardization had come<br />
in really. You've got the IBM PC, and everybody's producing a PC<br />
clone. Apple kept going, and Atari, and Commodore attempted to.<br />
If you were to start a computer company at that point, with a new<br />
computer, yeah, you'd need something to give your user base<br />
something to do with it, more than just what the manufacturer was<br />
selling. So, that's probably accurate. What do you think?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, I think it's accurate. That's what people started to expect.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. Another chord of the same issue which we've kind of touched<br />
on from Tom Dwyer. This is in 1984. He's saying, "Computer<br />
magazines used to have personality [laughter] and now they don't."<br />
Now, they really don't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They really don't!<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think they still have personality in form but now it's just<br />
inconsistent.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Who was Tom Dwyer? I don't remember him.<br />
<br />
David: Tom Dwyer? He was at University of Pittsburgh. He came up with all<br />
those neat applications. He and Margo...He had the best basic<br />
primer of anybody, in fact the only one that both Kemeny and Kurtz<br />
endorsed outside of their own material. He had really written some<br />
good Basic books.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm just finishing up here. The Internet says you were born in<br />
1939. Is that right?<br />
<br />
David: Yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Where were you born?<br />
<br />
David: New York, New York.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent.<br />
<br />
David: I was born in the hospital that my father had a hand in designing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Really?<br />
<br />
David: He was an architect up until the Recession. I think he, perhaps,<br />
designed the restrooms but he wasn't the...<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: When were you two married?<br />
<br />
Betsy: 1988. 25 years ago.<br />
<br />
David: June 18, 1988.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What's your last name now?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mine?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ahl.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I tried keeping this professional thing and it was just way too<br />
confusing, since that really wasn't my name anyway. That was my<br />
first husband's name, and then just...this is way too complicated.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My wife kept her maiden name and now she wishes she hadn't. It's<br />
just confusing. It just made sense to do.<br />
<br />
Betsy: If had been my maiden name, I might have, but it really wasn't.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What haven't I asked you that I should have?<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] We kind of were noodling it around last night and said,<br />
"Man, the guy's thorough."<br />
<br />
Betsy: You the most prepared interviewer ever.<br />
<br />
David: I jotted down a couple of notes. Nope.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Got everything?<br />
<br />
David: What's your thinking? Because originally you were talking to me<br />
about covering Wayne's magazines and so on.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My original thought, when I had put no thought into it, was that it<br />
would be half about Wayne's magazine and half about Creative. First<br />
of all, after talking to him, I thought there's not enough to do<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: Did you talk to Wayne?<br />
<br />
Kevin: I talked to Wayne.<br />
<br />
David: Well that's good to know, right? Carl Helmers didn't know if Wayne<br />
was still alive.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He's still alive.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's true. We asked Carl Helmers if Wayne was still alive and he<br />
was [inaudible 01:56:06] .<br />
<br />
David: Actually, there was another guy up there that published a computer<br />
magazine. What the heck was the name of it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Who are you talking about?<br />
<br />
David: Up in New Hampshire, Peterborough. It was one of the earlier would-<br />
be competitors to Datamation. So, it was much earlier.<br />
He was absolutely totally convinced about the Kennedy assassination<br />
and published a computer analysis of all the photos and everything<br />
else. Every single issue of the magazine had this stuff. He and<br />
Wayne were on the same wavelength on that. You ask Wayne about the<br />
conspiracy. [laughs] You'll get an earful.<br />
<br />
Kevin: In answer to your question. First, it was going to be the two, and<br />
then that happened. Also my wife said, "If you're doing two, then<br />
it's going to seem like a compare and contrast thing." That's not<br />
what I want to do.<br />
Now I'm thinking that this will be a project about the earliest<br />
computer magazines, the first computer magazines. That way, I can,<br />
whatever, four or five chapters. One on Creative, and maybe Byte.<br />
I'm meeting with the editor of Byte in a couple of weeks at an<br />
event, maybe Interface Age or one of the other ones.<br />
<br />
David: If you can find Bob Jones, that would be an interesting contrast.<br />
He was Interface Age. He had a different perspective on a lot of<br />
things, and I had a lot of respect for him. He just didn't sell at<br />
the right time. Too bad. Bob Jones was a very serious, good guy.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Who were the other early people? Dr. Dobbs? I don't know what...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, Dr. Dobbs...<br />
<br />
David: Jim Warren! Oh my goodness. That would give you another perspective<br />
altogether.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's, again, the California...<br />
<br />
David: Jim Warren and Bob Albrecht are tied together very closely. They're<br />
both in sort of in the alternative lifestyle. I don't know what<br />
you'd call it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That probably had Friday afternoon pot parties. [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Oh, boy. Did they ever! Yes, yes. Jim also was the one that started<br />
the West Coast computer fairs. He's a very capable guy. Dr. Dobb's<br />
journal was in a sense, well, you've probably seen it. You have,<br />
right? OK, so you know.<br />
That's really low level programming rather than higher languages.<br />
We're talking about machine languages, assembly language,<br />
programming, and there. It was sort of like Microsystems was to<br />
Byte. Microsystems, for the really serious hardware guy. Dr. Dobbs<br />
was for the really serious programmer, compared to Creative which<br />
was for people who just wanted to type something in that would<br />
work.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:59:35] basic right. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Dr. Dobbs. That was a totally different [inaudible 01:59:43]<br />
competitor.<br />
<br />
David: We didn't compete at all. I had a view that we competed at all with<br />
them; they may have thought we did but I didn't think so.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did they even have advertising?<br />
<br />
David: Oh yeah, actually they did, and it kept going for a long time<br />
because it was a small little nitch magazine. But, yeah, Jim Warren<br />
would be an interesting guy, very interesting guy early on. I don't<br />
know about Albert because you say he published more tabloid<br />
newspapers. I don't know if they ever really published any magazine<br />
size thing or not. Probably not, but it would give me a totally<br />
different perspective because they are coming from the west coast,<br />
looser or whatever.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That sounded pretty loose.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah nothing compared to that.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think he was sort of in rebellion when he started working at<br />
Creative Computing because he was coming off of AT&T where he had to<br />
wear a suit to work every day. So the first thing he did was burn<br />
his suits and wear t-shirt and jeans way before anybody was doing<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: I went extremely in the other direction, yeah I did, but who else<br />
real early. Personal computing which I think David Barnell somehow<br />
involved in it at some point in there. Because they moved from the<br />
west coast to New Jersey, they were bought by...who was that? It<br />
was mostly a company that published things like hardware age and<br />
advertiser-driven magazines. What was the name?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, gosh. Begins with an 'H'.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Halshep<br />
<br />
David: No. Anyway, when they brought personal computing...I think Barnell<br />
maybe even started it, and then they moved it to New Jersey, and<br />
then David said "I'm not going to New Jersey. I'm a west coast<br />
guy," or whatever. And then, they changed the whole thing totally.<br />
That's why I said they're one of the ones where they were so<br />
totally advertiser driven. A press release is a product review, as<br />
far as they were concerned.<br />
They had some interesting stuff. They were a competitor only in<br />
name, but also because they got the advertising. "I think I'm going<br />
to advertise." "Oh! We're going to publish a wonderful review! Give<br />
it to us." And so they were early, and they made money. There were<br />
a bunch of flash-in-the-pan magazines that lasted 2 or 3 or maybe 6<br />
issues, but nobody...<br />
<br />
Kevin: But only one in seven made it, so...<br />
<br />
Betsy: One in seven, right?<br />
<br />
David: That's right, exactly. I can't remember the name of some of these<br />
ones, but there was a very successful big magazine that published<br />
all Apple...reviews of Apple stuff. What was that one? Apple by<br />
themselves spawned I'd guess half a dozen magazines.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Inquest, and Insider, and Apple...a bunch of others there.<br />
<br />
David: Right. Actually, there's one that I can't think of the name of, it<br />
turned out, it was bigger and thicker and creative. They were<br />
publishing a lot of stuff, but again, it would all be positive and<br />
so they really killed us on getting advertising. We had been a<br />
publisher of Apple material for a while. Then all these others came<br />
along. That one, whatever it was, was really took a lot of<br />
advertising from us. I'll think about it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You'll remember.<br />
<br />
David: I'll remember some of this. When it all settled out, you came back<br />
down to eight or nine, but the ones we're talking about...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Well, at one point there was 200.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I think that's correct.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You are probably counting newsletters..<br />
<br />
Kevin: Probably industry-specific stuff and niche stuff but still, you<br />
went from one to 200, 10 years ago.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. That's true.</div>Mauryhttps://www.computingpioneers.com/index.php?title=Dave_Ahl_and_Betsy_Ahl&diff=149Dave Ahl and Betsy Ahl2019-10-01T14:20:21Z<p>Maury: </p>
<hr />
<div>This is a transcript of an audio interview. This transcript may contain errors - if you're using this material for research, etc. please verify with the original recorded interview.<br />
<br />
Source: ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast<br />
<br />
Source URL: http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-280-david-and-betsy-ahl-creative-computing-magazine<br />
<br />
Interviewer: Kevin Savetz<br />
<br />
Date: 3/4 April 2013<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm interested in how you guys got together. Was it some sort of<br />
office romance? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It started before then. I was working at Drew University and I was<br />
dating the computer science professor. He invited Dave...he was a<br />
subscriber to Creative Computing. I can remember being at his house<br />
and picking up a copy of this magazine and thinking, "Creative<br />
Computing," and laughing. "What kind of a title is that?"<br />
He invited Dave to come speak to one of his classes. While he was<br />
there, he said, "I should stop by your placement office. We're<br />
starting to expand. I'm looking for some people." Right? Am I<br />
getting this right? I was looking for other opportunities, so I<br />
sent him my resume. Many months later, he hired me.<br />
<br />
David: She still smarts about that.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: I interviewed her in, I don't know, April or so.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You interviewed me on April 17th and you did not hire me until<br />
August 1st. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: A lot was going on that year. That was '78.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was a really long time after that that we got married. We didn't<br />
get married until 10 years later.<br />
<br />
David: Actually, I had hired Betsy as our business manager. That's what I<br />
really needed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Not a wife, then.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not wife then, either.<br />
<br />
David: Not at that point. We had 2 buildings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had one.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, well I was looking for...<br />
<br />
Betsy: My first job was to find another building.<br />
<br />
David: We were expanding like crazy. In fact, one of the reasons that I<br />
didn't hire her sooner, I had just left my day job at AT&T, and was<br />
facing up to, "Oh my gosh, can I afford to take a salary out of<br />
Creative Computing?" Yes, we had expanded a lot, but can I even pay<br />
myself, much less other senior people? I left AT&T in July, and<br />
finally by August it became clear I really have to get this<br />
administration end of things under control.<br />
The editorial was OK. I had enough outside contributors that were<br />
going along with what we were doing in-house that I could continue<br />
with that, but it was the other end of things where we really had<br />
some problems. So then we go to 2 separate facilities. One was a 2<br />
family house on the other side of Morristown, and the other was a<br />
converted greenhouse garage, which is where I started. So, Betsy<br />
was in the greenhouse garage where I had the administration side of<br />
things, and I was at the house and that was the editorial and art<br />
and...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Software.<br />
<br />
David: ...putting the magazine together. Software, right. So she would<br />
come over from her place to my office every day or two just to let<br />
me know what's going on, and we'd get together. But it wasn't until<br />
I don't' remember the date when Betsy was saying, "Well, I'd like<br />
to get into..."<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well I had spent all my summers in college and two thereafter<br />
working at our local newspaper, writing editing and putting the<br />
whole thing together, so I think I more or less just said, "We've<br />
got all these new product announcements that we don't have anybody<br />
to do, why don't I just do them?" So, I started out doing the press<br />
releases and things.<br />
<br />
David: Her newspaper experience was first in high school covering sports.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, I started out covering the unpopular sports as a senior in<br />
high school. Because they didn't want a girl to write about the<br />
important sports. So they let the girl write about the unimportant<br />
sports, which turned out to be the winning sports, at this small<br />
New Jersey high school. That's how I started.<br />
<br />
David: And then at the newspaper, you started by writing obituaries,<br />
right?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well, it's one of the things I did. I always wanted to be a Spanish<br />
teacher. I didn't know anything about this. So, I got this sports-<br />
writing job by way of a babysitting job, I babysat for the<br />
publisher's kids and on the way home one night he said to me, "We<br />
always have a boy from the school who writes about the sports for<br />
the paper, do you know anybody?" and I said, "Well, I know the guy<br />
who did it last year, and if he could do it, I could do it."<br />
So I did that and didn't' think much more of it. Went off to<br />
college, came back over spring break, and ran into the guy in the<br />
grocery store and he said, "Would you like a job working for the<br />
paper this summer?" And I said sure. I had no idea whether he<br />
wanted me to sweep the floors or what, but it was a job so I took<br />
it. It was in the editorial department.<br />
<br />
And I learned from some very serious journalists who had worked for<br />
a very good paper, the Newark Evening News, which was a very<br />
serious paper that probably was too serious and folded, probably in<br />
the mid '60s, but these people were really good journalists and<br />
they taught me a lot.<br />
<br />
I think it was that first year, about halfway through the summer<br />
the publisher was on vacation, the editor was going to go on<br />
vacation when the publisher came back and the publisher, the day he<br />
was supposed to come back had appendicitis, had to have an<br />
appendectomy which back in those days was a much bigger deal than<br />
it is now. The editor said, "Well, I'm leaving." [laughs] And there<br />
I was. I was running this little paper.<br />
<br />
David: So I figured if you can run a newspaper, even though it's just a<br />
summer job, she could do a lot for us. Well, Betsy continued to<br />
handle the administrative things for really quite awhile and, as<br />
she said, probably was initially doing new product releases. Cause<br />
you get just tons of it over the transom and from these smaller<br />
companies...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So you'd like get a press release and then you'd rewrite it, that<br />
sort of things?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well we had a new product section and it was a format, a style for<br />
them, for each one. If they sent a photo, do a photo, a cut line<br />
for it. Basically what I do is let them pile up and then sort<br />
through and figure out which ones were worthy of attention. And<br />
then it was kind of just filler. They ran in one column and when<br />
you came to the end of the magazine whatever you had leftover you<br />
would fill in with these.<br />
<br />
David: And the thing is that the companies that were putting out these<br />
press releases, this was back in the, what '76, '77 or so, tiny<br />
little companies. They had no marketing expertise so they were<br />
sending us, in some cases, not quite handwritten but pretty crude.<br />
So it took some editing and some real work to make them readable.<br />
And then, as Betsy said, you had to guess. OK, which one, this is a<br />
significant product but is this guy going to be able to make this<br />
company go or is it just going to flop? And we tried to be<br />
responsible to the readers. Reporting on things that weren't just a<br />
wonderful great new idea but something that they were going to have<br />
on the market that was going to get some support and everything<br />
else. So anyway. That was a long story of how we got together.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I still don't know how you got together.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We were working in an office about as large as this banquette here<br />
together. Because when we first started working together we didn't<br />
have this other house. So it was the two of us. You had an actual<br />
desk I believe. I had a table that he had made out of particle<br />
board. Yeah it was fancy and I had to put duct tape along it<br />
because the edge was making holes in my clothes.<br />
So we worked in this office back to back, sort of got to know each<br />
other, and became friends, little by little. He said to me, when<br />
you're looking for this building, it would be a good thing if there<br />
was a place for me to live because I'm in the process of getting<br />
separated from my wife. Which it turned out you didn't do right<br />
away but eventually you did. Right?<br />
<br />
David: Well, it was three months later. That was right away in a sense.<br />
What precipitated that was we had a woman that was working in the<br />
mailroom and she got in cahoots with somebody in the accounting<br />
department and they started working a little embezzlement.<br />
<br />
Kevin: This was at the [inaudible 00:13:49] ?<br />
<br />
David: Pardon?<br />
<br />
Betsy: At Creative Computing.<br />
<br />
David: No, at Creative Computing. This was just after Betsy was hired. In<br />
fact, they had it going on before and I mean they were very good at<br />
it. What they did is they set up a bank account in the name of<br />
Creative Computing in the next county. And they would take very<br />
fourth or fifth check and it might be a subscription, it might be<br />
paying for an ad or something...<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was mostly the advertisers.<br />
<br />
David: Well it was both. And then they put that into their bank account.<br />
And then the one that was in the accounting department would mark<br />
the thing as paid.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, she didn't. That was her mistake.<br />
<br />
David: Well, she didn't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because that wasn't her job.<br />
<br />
David: Well she blew one. In any event it was my advertising manager that<br />
we had sent an overdue notice to one of the advertisers.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Apple.<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Apple. It was Regis McKenna, it was Apple's agency.<br />
<br />
David: And they said, we paid that. And a woman said, well send me proof.<br />
And they did. And we looked at the bank where it was deposited and<br />
then we called in local detective, police department. And they got<br />
the bank records and said, "How much do you think this was?" Well<br />
no they didn't say that, they said, this is probably a lot more<br />
than you thought.<br />
And it turned out to be well over $100,000. And our total annual,<br />
not even profit at that point...well, the gross was just about a<br />
million at that point, not quite, but close to it. So $100,000 was<br />
a big, big chunk 10 percent.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When was this?<br />
<br />
David: '78. And, so, obviously we fired these two. And then the court<br />
finally, they determined that they had also, one of them had been<br />
involved in welfare fraud and other stuff and the court ordered<br />
them to pay it back at the rate of, I don't know...<br />
<br />
Betsy: 47 cents a week.<br />
<br />
David: It was some tiny amount.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 00:16:26]<br />
[laughter and crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Course they'll never pay anything.<br />
<br />
David: And we got one payment you know, and that was it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And she was ordered to do public service. Like who wants someone<br />
doing public service for them who's done something like that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Magazines back then, probably any business but, they were a hotbed<br />
of intrigue. You had that happened and then the whole Bike Magazine<br />
getting stolen.<br />
<br />
David: So Betsy actually, in response to that brought, in response to the<br />
embezzlement brought in her Sister-in-Law Bobbi, and I think your<br />
mother too...<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Bobbi's mother.<br />
<br />
David: Bobbi's mother, OK. But one to...<br />
<br />
Betsy: My mother in law. I was a widow at the time.<br />
<br />
David: ...do some of the accounting because we didn't have an accountant<br />
and wanted just to help out and make some calls to advertisers and<br />
say can you speed up your payment a little bit and also calls to<br />
people that we owed money to, hey we're going to be maybe a little<br />
late. It really didn't look good. That was just a huge amount of<br />
money and so we had to stretch things out and hope that the growth<br />
continued so we could recover some of this.<br />
Betsy really rescued us there. It was amazing. We finally did<br />
stretch things out. What precipitated the separation with my wife<br />
at the time is I went home and told her this had happened and<br />
everything.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Thanksgiving weekend. Day before Thanksgiving.<br />
<br />
David: The day before Thanksgiving is when we got all the information from<br />
the police department and I went home to my wife and she said, "You<br />
dumb...," well I won't repeat the whole thing but, "You are so<br />
stupid. You trust people." "Yes, I trust people." "You shouldn't<br />
trust people like that. Get out of the house. I can't put up with<br />
this anymore." So it was a good thing we had a two family house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had this two family house.<br />
<br />
David: I moved into the bedroom on one side.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He had his office on one side of the top floor in the back bedroom<br />
and his bedroom in the back bedroom on the other side and his<br />
kitchen. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is this the place I was reading about where your bedroom was above<br />
the kitchen?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yes. The Ted Nelson.<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, a lot of things precipitated. Because of that, we had to<br />
make some other changes on personnel and move some people around. I<br />
think after that then Betsy took more of a role in the editorial<br />
end of things.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Stayed there until the bitter end.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The bitter end. Actually, I was there after he was gone.<br />
<br />
David: That's true.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ziff continued to pay me several months after they closed the<br />
magazine to stay behind and clean up because we have a 75,000<br />
square foot building. Make sure that we don't dispose of the<br />
hardware and just basically get it ready.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When you quit at the phone company to start a magazine, that must<br />
have been scary.<br />
<br />
David: I had left Digital Equipment in 1974, and I'm sure you read the<br />
whole rationale behind that, and joined AT&T in marketing,<br />
educational marketing. Same thing I was doing at DEC but obviously<br />
marketing different products to a different mix of customers. AT&T,<br />
back then and perhaps today, they had a real formula that you're in<br />
a job for two years and then they rotate you out or they put you in<br />
another job.<br />
The way AT&T works is they have certain steps. There's a manager<br />
and then a director level. There are levels, one, two, three, four,<br />
five. The operating companies, like Pacific Bell and so on, have<br />
similar steps that are considered a half step below AT&T. What they<br />
do is they rotate you out to an operating company, a half step<br />
promotion, they rotate you back into AT&T, now you're a full step.<br />
You never get a full step in one company.<br />
<br />
They had offered me a rotation to Southern Bell. Birmingham,<br />
Alabama. "No. No." Then probably two or three months later said<br />
we've got an opening in Wisconsin Tel. "Oh my gosh. Come on,<br />
something sensible." I turned them down, which was bad. You can't<br />
turn down. If you turn down three you might as well retire.<br />
<br />
The third one was, in a sense, it wasn't a promotion but it was a<br />
sideways job jump within AT&T itself. I went from having the<br />
education group, which was about eight people, to corporate<br />
communications, which is about 100 people and a huge budget. I was<br />
responsible for all of the marketing communications for the whole<br />
Bell system. Not advertising.<br />
<br />
We had seminar centers, put out all kinds of educational pamphlets,<br />
even a magazine for our customers on how to use the equipment. I<br />
was doing that. It's a big job. It's a 50 hour a week job. Creative<br />
Computing was halfway down the block. I'd go there at lunch time,<br />
see how things were doing.<br />
<br />
As I said a little bit ago, when it looked like we were going to<br />
hit a million dollars I said I've got to get serious about this.<br />
That's when I resigned from AT&T. That was probably the first, I<br />
shouldn't say the first, but that was a major problem with my wife<br />
at that time. You're leaving AT&T? You're leaving all those<br />
benefits? What are you doing, you idiot? We were on the downward<br />
spiral at that point and then the embezzlement just sealed the<br />
whole thing.<br />
<br />
Leaving any job for an unknown thing like you started a little<br />
company and you leave your day job. You're making a real<br />
commitment.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Even once you were at Creative full time, it looks like you did a<br />
lot of everything. You were writing, you were doing programming,<br />
you were being the editor, the publisher and the editor which is<br />
not done anymore.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. I don't know. You can correct me. I don't think I was a<br />
control freak.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. You had Phil Ellenberg. You had just hired Phil Ellenberg as<br />
the advertising manager. Richie was doing it. Where did he come<br />
from? He came from some respectable place. He came from some<br />
respectable place, Phil Ellenberg.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, he did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was like a real person who had a real job, not like the rest of<br />
us. He was the ad manager. I think once you made the step to leave<br />
AT&T then you mostly concentrated on the editorial. You weren't<br />
selling ads and writing and you had Steve North who was doing a lot<br />
of the editorial.<br />
<br />
David: At the beginning, yeah. The thing is I'd be lying if I said I knew<br />
how things were going to go, I knew this was going to be a huge<br />
magazine some day. I had no clue. When I started Creative Computing<br />
there weren't even personal computers at that point. I was<br />
convinced, I guess, that they would come about. I had no idea that<br />
it would be three months later that the Altair came about. It was<br />
more that I thought that an educational magazine like we had been<br />
publishing at DEC should continue.<br />
DEC had dropped off. They stopped publishing Edu when I left the<br />
education group. Well, they published an issue or two but they<br />
really weren't serious about continuing it. Then you had all of<br />
these people out here in the west coast, the Hewlett Packard<br />
computers. They were publishing some good software, they had some<br />
good arrangements with Minnesota Educational Computers Consortium<br />
and some others to distribute stuff that they developed, but there<br />
was no information source for schools and teachers and kids that<br />
were using computers.<br />
<br />
That's what I envisioned initially, but then once the Altair and<br />
the others came out people buy this kit computer and say what can I<br />
do with it? We've got these programs that will run.<br />
<br />
Betsy: First you have to steal Basic.<br />
<br />
David: What?<br />
<br />
Betsy: First you have to steal Basic.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I noticed that, I don't know what it's called, the public opinion<br />
or I don't know the word, this part here. The number one magazine<br />
of computer applications.<br />
<br />
David: That was a Davis thing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It started off first issue a non-profit magazine of educational and<br />
recreational. That was November 1970. May/June 1975 the words non-<br />
profit disappeared.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He never set it up as a non-profit.<br />
<br />
David: I did not.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You started making a profit.<br />
<br />
David: That's right. [laughs]<br />
Betsy; It was the unintentionally non-profit.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Three years later it quietly changed into the number one magazine<br />
of computer applications and software.<br />
<br />
David: That was when Ziff Davis took over.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Really? No, that was '78.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, that was '78.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, '78.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He stayed until the end.<br />
<br />
David: Right. OK. You're right. Who knows. We changed it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It seemed like a good idea at the time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's clearly a shift from education to education plus other things.<br />
<br />
David: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think it was when he realized that if you really wanted to make a<br />
profit you had to leave education behind because teachers want<br />
everything for free, or they certainly did then.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They have some websites for teachers. They still do. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Schools, teachers, yeah, they want everything for free and they get<br />
a lot for free. Places like Huntington Computer Project. There was<br />
one out here, Oregon. Yes, there was. I think it was based right<br />
here in Portland. It would have been, right, if it was in Oregon?<br />
Yes, there was a computing consortium at that time, Hewlett Packard<br />
oriented.<br />
Then you had People's Computer Company down in California that was<br />
sort of providing stuff to schools. They were mostly into<br />
alternative schools and there were a lot of them in the Bay area at<br />
that time. In fact, there was a magazine or a newspaper, big thing,<br />
I don't know how often it came out, called the "De-school Primer".<br />
<br />
It was for people that...I won't say they were hippies but<br />
basically homeschoolers but they got together and said, "We're<br />
going to educate our kids outside of the public education system<br />
but we don't want to do it individually. We'll get together." There<br />
was a big movement there and they were into computers, unlike the<br />
public schools back in '75, '76.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Homeschooling back then was very avant-garde. It was not approved.<br />
<br />
David: Not like today. The shift away from education. That, of course, was<br />
partially driven by the hardware that was then available to people<br />
at home.<br />
When I first started the magazine, I had four editors over the<br />
years, five I guess, but Steve Gray had been publishing a<br />
newsletter, what he called the "Amateur Computer Group Newsletter".<br />
It was for engineers who were scavenging up old parts from<br />
Honeywell and IBM and GE and DEC and trying to put together a<br />
computer. You've got success stories and here's how you can make<br />
this worth together.<br />
<br />
That was a long way away from an Altair, but that's what I was<br />
focusing on, people that were doing that and education. Changed our<br />
focus. You're right. Good observation.<br />
<br />
Kevin: After that, do you feel the focus changed in the next 10 years?<br />
<br />
David: The focus changed largely due to selling the magazine to Ziff<br />
Davis.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When's that?<br />
<br />
David: We were negotiating for a while and I think the sale finally went<br />
through in '83. Yeah, '83. Maybe late '82 but roughly then. They<br />
felt that you need more of a business focus, small business and<br />
people running businesses out of their home. That's where it<br />
started but then we got into real small businesses. I shouldn't say<br />
real but a store front or a small manufacturer, something like<br />
that. That's probably a direction we would not have gone. I<br />
wouldn't have gone on my own.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had a magazine called "Small Business Computing." Remember?<br />
<br />
David: That's right, we did. I would have kept Creative more targeted on<br />
the home market and still education, to some extent, but more on<br />
the home and people that were running a business, a single<br />
entrepreneur. You could review a spreadsheet or a small business<br />
computer or higher end printer or something but not lift it up to<br />
that next level up.<br />
When you're owned by somebody else and they say this is what we<br />
want to do you've got to be responsive to it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Why did you sell? Was it something that had to be done? I've read<br />
the official line.<br />
<br />
David: I think the official line is pretty close to the real line. What<br />
happened is the first magazine, maybe not the very first but the<br />
first sizable magazine, to sell was the Byte and they sold to<br />
McGraw Hill. Then there were three or four other sales. At the time<br />
there were maybe eight special interest publishers in the country.<br />
You had Hurst and CBS magazine and Ziff Davis. Maybe eight serious<br />
ones. There were some others that were, "Oh, it'd be nice if we<br />
could get into it."<br />
What happened is all of us at that point were spending maybe<br />
$100,000, $150,000 on circulation promotion. McGraw Hill says we<br />
want to get out there, we're going to spend a million dollars.<br />
They're mailing 10 times as much as we are. They're going to trade<br />
shows with big, elaborate booths and handing out all kinds of...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Free magazines.<br />
<br />
David: Not only free magazines but other stuff. That was half of it. The<br />
other half, which was probably more than half, was the advertising<br />
sales. We were using reps. We had different reps in different parts<br />
of the country, paying the rep commission on the advertising. When<br />
you are a McGraw Hill or a Hurst or a Ziff Davis you've got an in-<br />
house staff. They would have a reception at one of the computer<br />
conferences, a big deal.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We used to have a hospitality suite at the hotels in some of these<br />
conferences and then we would bring little hunks of cheese that we<br />
cut up from home and sneak the bottles of wine up the back stairway<br />
and they were having these big things with the giant balls of<br />
shrimp.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. It was just an order of magnitude different than what we<br />
could do. What happened, really, was that it got to the point where<br />
there were only three, really two, serious bidders that were still<br />
looking for a magazine and there are still about four magazines,<br />
four decent quality magazines, on the market and one was Compute,<br />
one was Interface Age. Personal Computing had just sold, there was<br />
us, and I forget who the fourth one was. There was four.<br />
<br />
Kevin: There were more magazines than buyers at this point.<br />
<br />
David: That's right. There were a lot more magazines, too, but there were<br />
four major players. One of the buyers, I didn't really regard them<br />
as serious, and that was Atari. I think they wanted to back into<br />
the thing. The two buyers left were CBS, and they had a magazine<br />
division at that time, and Ziff Davis and that was it. I said,<br />
"Man, I've got to make a deal here." That's what happened.<br />
I look back with hindsight. I said the guy, Robert I forget his<br />
last name, that owned Compute magazine, he held out. He held out<br />
until the end and he said, "I'm better than Interface Age," and he<br />
was and whatever the other one was, Family Computing, "I'm better<br />
than them." He got a really nice payoff from CBS because it was the<br />
last one and they wanted him. I don't know. If I had held off a<br />
little more would I have gotten more? Probably.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How much did you get?<br />
<br />
David: Can we publish this figure?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't know. I don't think we ever have.<br />
<br />
David: No, we never have.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's my chance for a scoop.<br />
<br />
David: Pardon?<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's my chance for a scoop.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] I'd rather not say. I can tell you Compute, if you ever<br />
read that number, which you will, it was seven times that much. It<br />
was huge. Huge. At that point, I think CBS just said we've got to<br />
get into this. We've really got to do something. The big loser was<br />
Bob Jones at Interface Age. He had a good magazine. That was a<br />
good, solid magazine. Bob Jones, he went to shows, he was always in<br />
a suit and tie. He would have fit into the corporate environment<br />
very well but he held out too long. I think he was holding out for<br />
even more.<br />
That's what I was afraid of. Less than a year later he was out of<br />
business. There was no way you could compete with these big guys.<br />
Ziff instantly started having these receptions at PC expos.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They had ad reps all over the country.<br />
<br />
David: Ad reps, yeah. Oh my gosh. We would not have survived.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Again, you [inaudible 00:41:03] .<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Not exactly right but yes. Wasn't bad. Wasn't bad.<br />
<br />
Kevin: But Ziff didn't have it for very long before they let it go. It was<br />
only a couple of years.<br />
<br />
David: It was almost four years. Three and a half years. They did a study,<br />
and this is one of the classics. I've been making a presentation at<br />
Leslie Park last year on the 10 biggest blunders in personal<br />
computing, and actually it's up to 12 now. One was, and I still<br />
feel that it was huge, is that Ziff Davis analyzed that market in<br />
'85 and determined that the home market, the market for home<br />
computers, had reached saturation. Five percent of the homes have a<br />
computer. That's it.<br />
There were three things, three major conclusions from their survey.<br />
I think probably one and a half of them were pretty good and one<br />
and a half were just absolutely wrong. The home market reaching<br />
saturation, wrong. The second one was that they said that the<br />
magazines that would be successful would be those that were focused<br />
on specific brands of computers. Are you getting all that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: With the IBM PC it really brought standardization to the industry.<br />
Their analysis was that Apple and PC were going to be the dominant<br />
players in the future and in that they were right. They said we've<br />
got to have a magazine that's just focused on those two and they<br />
did. What was their Apple magazine? They had two Apple magazines.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A+.<br />
<br />
David: But they also had the one for the Mac.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mac User.<br />
<br />
David: They had two Apple magazines and then PC. PC they spun off a whole<br />
bunch. PC Week.<br />
<br />
Betsy: PC Junior.<br />
<br />
David: A bunch of them. In any event, they were right in that. The other<br />
one that they were semi-right, in the long term future they were<br />
totally wrong but in the short term future they were probably<br />
right, and that they looked at...We had been covering bulletin<br />
board systems. CompuServe, whatever its predecessor was, basically<br />
online type of stuff.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Genie.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. They said that's just a flash in a pan, online stuff. Well, in<br />
'85 it was. It took a while. It took another 8 to 10 years for that<br />
but then oh my God. You know what's happened today. If they had<br />
stuck with Creative Computing and rather than trying to make it a<br />
small business focused magazine but kept the home and the online<br />
focus we would have owned the Internet market today, absolutely<br />
owned it. It would have been a bigger magazine than all the others<br />
put together. Hindsight is 20/20.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I know it wasn't your choice but do you have regret about that?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: At the time it was devastating.<br />
<br />
David: Absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was like someone killing your child.<br />
<br />
David: At the time, we sat in these meetings up in Stanford, Connecticut,<br />
of all places. The reason for that is Bill Ziff. What happened in<br />
the interim a year or two after they purchased Creative Computing<br />
and PC, Bill Ziff came down with cancer really big time and was<br />
afraid of dying next year. So he was moving all of his resources<br />
and the holdings outside of New York to avoid really major<br />
taxation. I'm not sure that Connecticut was much better but he was<br />
splitting them between Connecticut and Florida. Anyway, we wound up<br />
having a bunch of meetings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was trying to maintain residence in Connecticut.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I guess that was it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was living in the Crown Plaza.<br />
<br />
David: I remember the last one. We were up at the hotel.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Crown Plaza. It was Stanford, it wasn't Harvard.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, Stanford.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I said Harvard.<br />
<br />
David: When they finally came and said we're going to shut this down. That<br />
was a devastating time. We probably could have continued to work<br />
for Ziff if we had been willing to go into New York but when you<br />
get used to working a mile or two from where you live the idea of<br />
commuting into New York, who knows what the job would have been.<br />
Bye. That was it. That was, in retrospect, a mistake.<br />
The other thing that happened as a result of Bill Ziff having this<br />
bout with cancer is that Ziff Davis sold off all of their other<br />
special interest magazines. Popular Boating, Popular Photography.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yachting, Modern Bride.<br />
<br />
David: They had a big group of travel magazines. Actually, one of the<br />
things they did after Creative Computing was to shut down...we got<br />
friendly with the publisher and some of the people in the traveling<br />
division and we started doing some freelance travel writing.<br />
I was writing a monthly column for one of the travel magazines that<br />
went to travel agents on automating your travel office and so on,<br />
which was an interesting thing because there's a small business<br />
that really depended upon computers with the reservation systems<br />
and all the airlines had a different reservation system. You had to<br />
have Saber.<br />
<br />
A lot of them would go with one and make an agreement with somebody<br />
else to make their other reservations. In any event, it was a bad<br />
system and I was writing a column on how to make this work for you.<br />
As you know, I don't know how many months later we got into the<br />
Atari camp.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was your next gig?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. It was Joe Sugarman, remember, that hooked us up with Atari.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I thought it was Neil Harris.<br />
<br />
David: He was the one we worked with but it was Sugarman.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because he came from Commodore. I didn't know it was Joe Sugarman.<br />
<br />
David: He ran a company called JS&A for Joe Sugarman and Associates. They<br />
were the first one that took these full page ads in lots of<br />
different magazines and the quarter page...<br />
<br />
Betsy: The first advertorials.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, advertorial. The first print advertorials. Really serious<br />
stuff. Out of that, he spawned at least a dozen other companies.<br />
Sharper Image is a Sugarman and it's a spinoff. They've got a whole<br />
page just focused on this air ionizer or some crazy product, but he<br />
sold tons of that stuff. Then he started offering courses. He was<br />
on the verge of doing some big deal with Atari and so he knew all<br />
the people out there.<br />
I had taken his course and started running the ad. In fact, there's<br />
probably one in one of those issues that is basically a Sugarman<br />
ad. And so anyway, you took the course, too. So we got to know him.<br />
He got to know us, and we kept up. And, oh, OK. Creative Computing<br />
has folded, and I'm trying to get something going with Atari and<br />
getting their magazine really serious. And so he was the one that<br />
hooked us up with them. By the way, I'm surprised that you don't<br />
have Atari Explorer on your website<br />
<br />
Kevin: On the website? Well, the deal with my Atari magazines website is<br />
I've always strove to get permission. Atari can't be owned by the<br />
same company for more than three months at time.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's hard to get permission that way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You can't get permission. But it's out there, elsewhere. There are<br />
other archivists who don't bother to get permission. That's another<br />
good way to do things. Yeah, it's out there. I think Archive.org<br />
has it.<br />
<br />
David: Really? Yeah, because I hadn't seen it. I was looking for<br />
something...I still get inquires every once in a while from<br />
somebody that wants something in one of the previous magazines that<br />
we've published.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That's why I don't' risk it. There's a few magazine that I just<br />
absolutely would not, because it's owned by some giant monolith<br />
corporation now, and they need to hold on everything even if it's<br />
30 years old.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because someday they might be able to make money from it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right. That's why that's not there.<br />
Talk to me about...You did some weird stuff. The weird stuff I'm<br />
thinking of is the board game.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: "Computer Rage."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We just saw that. We might not have even remembered what it was it,<br />
but we saw it last night at the museum.<br />
<br />
David: They have one in the Collection's area of the Computer Museum. They<br />
didn't even know that we published it. I thought, "Look at this."<br />
<br />
Kevin: You did Computer Rage, which was weird; I want to ask you about<br />
that. You did the record album.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The record album made way more sense than the game.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, well it was a guy named Allan. He was a colonel at that time<br />
and he came to see me with the idea for the computer game.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I forgot about that.<br />
<br />
David: He was a colonel in the Army and had something to do with<br />
educational programs. The Army said people should know more about<br />
how computers work and everything else. He said, "The games that<br />
are on the market are pretty tacky and not fun. I've devised<br />
something." We worked together with him. We finally decided, "All<br />
right. We'll publish this game. By the way, he's a general and<br />
finally retired.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But he's not financing his retirement with [inaudible 00:54:29] .<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: No, not at all.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Will anyone buy this?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We did overprint.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't a big seller or big success, but we sold enough of them.<br />
Now the record was a little different. There was a guy named Dick<br />
Moberg who, at the time, was the president of the Philadelphia Area<br />
Computer Society. The first two personal computer festivals were<br />
actually in New Jersey, not the west coast. The West Coast Computer<br />
Faire came later with Jim Warren and that group. John Dilks started<br />
this computer festival in Atlantic City. This was before Atlantic<br />
City was a big casino place, but...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well, it was a casino place, but...<br />
<br />
David: ...but it was pretty tacky.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It still is.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Not like now.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not like now where it's so classy.<br />
<br />
David: In any event, they were having some issues with the hotel and the<br />
convention center in Atlantic City. Dick Moberg said, "We people in<br />
Philadelphia can do a better job than you guys in New Jersey." And<br />
he got together with what was his name? Lenny? And<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh! Saul Levis.<br />
<br />
David: Saul Levis, who was the president of the New Jersey amateur<br />
computer group. The two of them got together and said yeah, it'll<br />
be more convenient if we do a thing in Philadelphia. And Saul<br />
Levis, he had put together the first Trenton computer festival. It<br />
wasn't a big huge thing; it's gotten to be gigantic. In any event<br />
they said OK, we'll do this. At that point, this was '78; the Apple<br />
had just come out and people were making little plug-in<br />
peripherals.<br />
There was a company that...I'm not going to be able to remember who<br />
it was. They made a nice little plug-in board for the Apple. What<br />
they had was a very nice thing on the screen where you could<br />
position notes and then have them played back. So it was a visual<br />
programming of music.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Music Construction Center?<br />
<br />
Betsy: There were ads for it in magazines.<br />
<br />
David: No, it was a guy out of Denver. I don't remember. Anyway, before<br />
that everything had appeared line by line. But there were some<br />
reasonable playback systems that were starting to come on the<br />
market for the S-100 bus. There were about four of them. The<br />
programming was a little bit harrier, but nonetheless they sounded<br />
OK. And then there was still the leftovers in a sense that people<br />
that were doing work on mainframes to process music.<br />
So Dick Moberg said, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could get a number<br />
of these together?" And of course there's the Philadelphia<br />
Orchestra, we'll make it a Philadelphia Computer Music Festival! So<br />
it was largely his idea, but then, how do you publicize it? Well,<br />
you've got this magazine that's in your backyard, that was willing<br />
to recruit some people and publicize it. So we got about...I don't<br />
know at the festival there were probably 25 or 30 people that had<br />
stuff.<br />
<br />
They recorded it all, which in retrospect was a bit of a mistake<br />
because they had problems with one of the two channels in the<br />
stereo. They had the big reel-to-reel tape recorder, one of the<br />
channels was seriously too low. And then they said, "Well, we've<br />
got this wonderful tape; what are we going to do with it?" And I<br />
said, "Well, I'll do something with it."<br />
<br />
I hooked up with a studio in the city that made records, and we<br />
went in there and corrected the low channel a little bit, not<br />
totally, but enough that it sounded like stereo. And put together a<br />
vinyl record!<br />
<br />
I edited out a lot of the poor quality performances, made the<br />
record, and that sold! It sold pretty well. Our biggest problem was<br />
shipping. How do you ship a 12-inch vinyl record without it<br />
breaking? But that sold pretty well. That, of course, died off<br />
along with everything else when Creative Computing got killed by<br />
Ziff. But, I still had the original test pressing of that, the<br />
original, original.<br />
<br />
I played it back, and it sounded very good. Put it into, I forget<br />
what the software was, but, it was one, the digital routine. It<br />
would have been nice if I still had the original tape, but, I<br />
didn't. But, OK, it's got a little bit of deterioration, going to a<br />
record.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, we're not talking about losing overtones of a<br />
violin up at 15,000 hertz. It was within a narrow band, to begin<br />
with, in any event. But that did let me totally correct the left<br />
channel and bring it up to what it should be. I put that out. I'm<br />
selling CDs now, of that.<br />
<br />
In fact, a guy from Australia ordered one, and obviously, the<br />
postage to send anything overseas is a lot more. He said, "Why<br />
don't you just make MP3 files out of it?" Because, they're WAV<br />
files, the way they are now. I go, "OK."<br />
<br />
This is very recent, like within the last couple of weeks, I<br />
downloaded some software, "Convert WAV to MP3," converted it, sent<br />
them the files. They said, "That's great." What I think what I'll<br />
probably do is try to figure out how I can make them available from<br />
a website.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You've apparently forgotten that, like, 10 years ago, I did that.<br />
They're there.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. I know.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They're at vintagecomputermusic.com.<br />
<br />
David: Are they MP3s?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Well, then, I don't have to do it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You dummy.<br />
<br />
David: Bam. I did remember. I didn't know that you did them all. I thought<br />
you did a sample.<br />
<br />
Kevin: No. They're all there. I can see you're getting reflux.<br />
<br />
David: Boom. I wasted a little time. I waste a lot of time, these days.<br />
That was a cool thing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just think it was neat that you guys were willing to take chances<br />
with weird stuff.<br />
<br />
David: Where we took chances with really weird stuff was in the software.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Software publishing?<br />
<br />
David: We had a brand called, Sensational Software. Unfortunately, Ziff<br />
decided it was competing with some potential advertisers, which it<br />
was, in a sense. They killed it off. But, we had some really good<br />
stuff. We had the Apple game, what the heck was it? It was ported<br />
directly over from the arcade games.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Was it, "Space Invaders"?<br />
<br />
David: "Space Invaders."<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was a clone of, "Space Invaders"?<br />
<br />
David: It was the real.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You got it from, Jeff Lee's guy.<br />
<br />
David: Because, "Space Invaders," the Japanese game, was one of the first<br />
full-sized console video games where they used a general-purpose<br />
chip. "Space Invaders," was programmed for the 6502, Apple.<br />
We bought it from this Japanese company, and we had the only real<br />
"Space Invaders" game. That was one, and a couple of others that we<br />
really could have gone places with. That was just about the time<br />
that Ziff came in and said, "Nah, you can't have this anymore."<br />
<br />
They were into printed media, so, they kept the books going, but,<br />
not any of the other stuff. The other thing we had, was, speaking<br />
of computer music, a little division, that probably could have<br />
gotten a lot bigger, called Peripherals Plus. We were marketing a<br />
little computer music board, it was an S-100 bus once. But if we<br />
had then...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Didn't we have a plotter, too?<br />
<br />
David: Yep. We had about five or six interesting, low-level products. But,<br />
again, Ziff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That stuff was really competing with the advertisers.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Obviously, that wasn't our intent. But, yes it was. We also<br />
offered courses at that time. Do you remember, at County College?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't.<br />
<br />
David: That was just at when we moved into the new building at Hanover. We<br />
had two people that were doing that.<br />
<br />
Betsy: One of them was that crazy, Larry guy. He was seriously weird.<br />
<br />
David: County College of Morris, we reached an agreement that we would<br />
teach their Introductory Computer course. Not for their day<br />
students, but they offered evening courses, adult education, we<br />
were doing that. Fingers in a lot of pies, at that point.<br />
Actually, from that standpoint, it was, probably, good that Ziff<br />
got us a little bit more focused, and back to the roots of<br />
publishing. Getting spread a little thin.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You went to Atari, got the Atari game, and you did the "Atari<br />
Explorer," right?<br />
<br />
David: "Atari Explorer." They had had an occasional publication, not<br />
really a magazine, but one that was focused on the games, and they<br />
decided that they could start that one up again. It started up with<br />
a new name. We called it, "Atarian." It was focused, basically, on<br />
video games. You buy one of their video games and you get an issue.<br />
Anyway, there were different ways that they were going to promote<br />
it.<br />
But, a year later Nintendo just, absolutely, buried "Atarian," in<br />
'89. They kept Atari Spore going for, I think, two more issues,<br />
right?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Was it two?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember the details.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't much.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I remember why they killed it.<br />
<br />
David: Ms. Feisty here. Come on. You've got to tell the story here.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They were playing games with our printer. Production schedule.<br />
Everybody had a production schedule. We never missed our production<br />
date, getting things to the printer, getting them mailed. We just<br />
did it because that's what you had to do. I will probably get sued<br />
for this. Atari started not paying the printer and the printer says<br />
we're not going to print this until we get paid. The date kept<br />
slipping and slipping and the subscribers would be calling up and<br />
saying, "Where's my magazine?"<br />
This went on. It was bi-monthly. It went on for maybe six months. I<br />
finally wrote an editorial in which I explained to the readers<br />
exactly what was going on. They didn't see it until it was printed.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
David: That didn't get into the magazine, though.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It did.<br />
<br />
David: That's right, it did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They never saw it. We were producing it out of [inaudible 01:10:07]<br />
New Jersey and printing it in eastern Pennsylvania and they never<br />
saw it until it was too late. My tenure was cut short but I didn't<br />
really care at that point. I was sick of them. It was really hard.<br />
They're not easy people to deal with, even when the owners last for<br />
more than three months. That was my suicide by editorial. The only<br />
time in my life I've ever been fired.<br />
<br />
David: I didn't realize they didn't read that beforehand but I should<br />
have. I should have.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] I probably wouldn't have gotten fired if they had.<br />
<br />
David: That was the straw that broke the camera's back.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But then John [inaudible 01:11:05] kept doing it a little bit.<br />
<br />
David: I know. In a lot of cases, particularly with the games magazine,<br />
they wanted to approve everything that went in it. If you do an<br />
objective product review, you call it like it is. Oh m gosh, there<br />
was one, it wasn't just one product but a roundup after Consumer<br />
Electronics' show, and I don't remember what it was. Atari had<br />
brought out some new products that really weren't ready to go.<br />
In some cases I just said, "I'm not going to say anything about<br />
this one or these two or three. I'll focus on the ones that are<br />
ready to go or are in good shape." Oh my gosh. "What about this?<br />
This is a wonderful thing." "Well, maybe it will be but it isn't<br />
yet." We had issues all along on censorship and them changing what<br />
we had written and everything. As Betsy said, they were not nice<br />
people to work with. I forget, the two brothers.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Trammell.<br />
<br />
David: Trammell, yeah. That came from Commodore.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Jack and somebody else. Jack and his brother.<br />
<br />
David: It was interesting because yesterday I saw Nolan Bushnell. He was<br />
at that event. Nolan was flamboyant, but basically he had integrity<br />
and he was an honest guy. Man, oh man. Didn't stay and the<br />
corporation changed after he left.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Then you're done with Atari and then it's straight to military<br />
vehicles there?<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] No.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was a hiatus.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, man. We published magazines, in-house magazines, for a couple<br />
other organizations. Did one for Nabisco called...I don't even<br />
remember but it was for their marketing department. Published that<br />
for some period of time and then they decided to bring it in-house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was more like a newsletter.<br />
<br />
David: It was 16 pages. It was getting there.<br />
<br />
Betsy: 16 pages is a newsletter.<br />
<br />
David: All right. Magazine format. Let's put it that way. We did some<br />
fulfillment. Basically, a lot of freelance writing on the travel<br />
field.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Stuffed dogs. The stuffed dogs. Remember those four dogs for my<br />
brother?<br />
<br />
David: That's fulfillment. Fulfillment for Con Edison. I published a<br />
couple newsletters for a while, one called "Effective Investing"<br />
and one called "Effective Communication" for writers. We're talking<br />
early '90s.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was when people still cared, thought that there might be a<br />
correct way to do something and they wanted to know what it was.<br />
<br />
David: That was focused on "Take this computer and start to use it as a<br />
tool. Don't be afraid of the thing." '91/'92 not everybody was<br />
using a computer yet or a personal computer. That was the<br />
orientation of that. Then the other thing we got into big time was<br />
we'd been involved with a local rescue mission for men with drug,<br />
alcohol, homeless issues and we were writing and producing their<br />
newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We were producing all of their fundraising material.<br />
<br />
David: We started, I think, with the newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, we did everything. Appeal letters and newsletters and<br />
maintaining their database, the donor database. It took a lot of<br />
time.<br />
<br />
David: We did that for five years. Then '96 I got an opportunity to buy<br />
this crazy military vehicles magazine for people that were<br />
restoring old historic military vehicles. It was a magazine but it<br />
was I guess more of a glorified newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was horrible.<br />
<br />
David: It was horrible but it was really terrible. In fact, the editor or<br />
the publisher, whatever, the owner, he'd take the articles however<br />
the writer would send them. If it was double spaced type, boom,<br />
that's what would appear in the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Save all the typesetting.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He had zero typesetting expense.<br />
<br />
David: Zero editing. He just took anything that came in, put it in. Ads<br />
the same way. Half the ads were hand written. Well, not half, but a<br />
significant number had corrections on them by hand. Oh my gosh. It<br />
was so terrible. I made it into a real magazine and built it up. At<br />
that point the circulation had been about 10,000. We built it up<br />
and we were pushing close to 20,000 magazines. It was a real<br />
magazine. I sold it to Crowsey publications.<br />
Then they, which I did not realize at the time, the owner, Chet<br />
Crowsey, had put the whole company up for sale and he sold the<br />
company a year or two later to some other specialty magazine<br />
publisher. We're talking narrow, narrow niche. They published a lot<br />
of, what'd they call it, white tail bow hunting. Really, really<br />
narrow stuff. Up in northern Wisconsin is where they were based. In<br />
any event, he sold it.<br />
<br />
The new publishers, their whole stick was making money. They<br />
immediately raised the subscription price of military vehicles. We<br />
were charging $18 a year which was fine and they raised it to<br />
$21.95 or something and they raised the advertising rates and<br />
everything else.<br />
<br />
The last I knew, the circulation was back down around 10,000.<br />
[laughs] It doesn't pay off to take that approach. I didn't have<br />
the same emotional connection, with that as I did with Creative<br />
Computing and the other magazines there. Fine, you do what you want<br />
with the magazine, it's OK.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You didn't care too much?<br />
<br />
David: Nah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What do you guys do now? It seems like charity work and [inaudible<br />
01:19:45] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. I run a non-profit called Beyond the Walls and he runs his<br />
website and does Bible studies.<br />
<br />
David: Right. Actually, Betsy, the organization she has, she's executive<br />
director of Beyond the Wall, that's gotten huge.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's getting bigger and bigger.<br />
<br />
David: It's gotten huge.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think huge is probably an exaggeration.<br />
<br />
David: Well, not huge like a Gates Foundation thing.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I wish. We started in 2005 with 26 volunteers going to Guatemala to<br />
work with this organization that works with the people who scavenge<br />
in the Guatemala City garbage dump. The dump is in a ravine. It<br />
started in the early '50s and as it has filled up around the edges<br />
they put a couple layers of sand on it and let it sit for a bit and<br />
then the people build houses on it out of scraps and things that<br />
they made.<br />
This organization called Potter's House that we work with has been<br />
working with them for 26 years. They have an education program,<br />
micro-enterprise and health and various things that they do. Since<br />
2005 we've been sending volunteer teams. We're not the only ones<br />
sending volunteer teams down there to build houses and do<br />
healthcare and do stuff with the kids. So we started with 26 and by<br />
the end of the year we'll be well over 150 volunteers. We'll have<br />
three weeks this summer, I'll have 135 over three weeks this<br />
summer.<br />
<br />
It started in our backyard and one of the reasons that we wanted<br />
to...It started in the church and we started the organization<br />
partially because it's easier to raise money if you're not a church<br />
and it's also easier to make the volunteer opportunities available<br />
to people. If you say "Oh I'm going to Guatemala." "Oh I'd love to<br />
go with you! Who's going?" "It's my church." "Oh."<br />
<br />
But, if it's this local non-profit it's more appealing and we've<br />
really succeeded in doing that because we have people not only from<br />
in our own community, but this year we're going to have a family<br />
from Oklahoma, about six families from Texas, several people from<br />
Florida.<br />
<br />
David: You got the Virginia.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Virginia. It's like oh my goodness. How is this happening?<br />
<br />
Kevin: And everyone goes out to Guatemala and does the [inaudible<br />
01:22:31] ?<br />
[cross talk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. We all meet in Guatemala. I have three teams. One each week,<br />
and I'll be there the whole time and they'll come down and probably<br />
each team will build two or three houses. They'll do medical<br />
clinic, they'll do day camp for kids, soccer or baseball, sports<br />
things.<br />
They were about teenagers, so they love to do the...Everybody does<br />
construction in the morning. Then, in the afternoon teenage girls<br />
and some of the boys who want to do other stuff will help out with<br />
these other kid-related activities. That's what I'm doing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My wife is in Africa this week and last doing something similar.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Cool.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Which is why I have to leave shortly to go get my kids.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: What part of Africa is she in?<br />
<br />
Kevin: She did some stuff for Special Olympics. Then, they were helping<br />
build something at a food bank. I don't know that much yet, because<br />
she's not home yet.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Cool.<br />
<br />
David: That's terrific. She'll be changed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: She keeps telling that she wished I could've come, and I do, too.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You have this kid. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: We've got the two kids. The six-year-old doesn't feed herself real<br />
well.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: She can't drive to school.<br />
<br />
David: Your annual budget has gone from 0 to what? Are you going to hit<br />
about 150, 200,000 this year?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's over 300 already.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, OK. [laughs] 300.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's small potatoes compared to...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: As my boss, the Chairman of the Board, and I'm the only employee,<br />
is fond of saying, "The people out there don't realize that we're<br />
just a bunch of schlumps sitting around a table making this stuff<br />
up as we go along. Very good leadership. He's a very good leader.<br />
<br />
David: We were trying to maybe see if we can touch base with the Gates<br />
Foundation when we were up there. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: We got a brochure into his hands.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we got a brochure into his hands and some other stuff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was Bill Gates there?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah. I had a picture of him that I had taken at the first<br />
Altair convention in 1976, before he had actually made the deal<br />
with Altair to develop BASIC. He had said, "I can do it," but they<br />
hadn't signed the whole thing. I've got a picture of him as a 20-<br />
year-old or thereabouts, talking at this little convention.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You showed it to him?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. I gave him a copy. The problem I had is that...some people<br />
keep everything. I pretty much give everything away.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, you are lying. You keep everything.<br />
<br />
David: I do keep a lot of stuff. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Then, you give it away later. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Well, when Stan Freiberger was putting together the "Fire in<br />
the Valley" book, I gave him a lot of photographs and I gave him<br />
the originals. Then the publisher said, "It's not good enough. The<br />
photo. You get the negative." OK, they're gone. Never any of that<br />
came back. In fact, what I had to do is scan the photo from the<br />
book to make the print to give to Bill.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Photos of being young and cute.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was his Woody Allen phase. He looked exactly like Woody Allen<br />
did at that phase in his life.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:26:30] too.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm sure there is.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It is a lot [inaudible 01:26:33] .<br />
<br />
David: She improves with age. Every year.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I saw the picture! You look the same.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, the instant Paul Allen showed up, of course, everybody's<br />
mingling around this museum. All of a sudden there was like an<br />
arrow head over in that direction.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was this sucking sound.<br />
<br />
David: And then Bill shows up and, oh my God, everybody has to go see<br />
Bill.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was talking to Bob Rynett this morning, the guy who organized it,<br />
and he said, "Oh, Paul was very happy. Paul was very pleased with<br />
the way the event went." He said his only regret was that he and<br />
Bill didn't have enough time to spend with the people. And I'm<br />
thinking, "Well, OK, if you just stayed a little longer."<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Well, at least Paul Allen did come to the dinner.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, he stayed a little longer, but Bill, he was in and out like<br />
a...<br />
<br />
David: Bill was there for maybe an hour.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He just showed up because he had to.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, exactly. It was a cameo.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:27:52] cameo there?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, yes. There I am. I was thinner then. Oh! There's Ted in his<br />
hat! And Peter [inaudible 01:28:02] . Who's that guy?<br />
<br />
David: Dick Heiser was at the convention and he had one of the hats. The<br />
Xanadu hat.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was wearing one of those hats. The rings were actually silver.<br />
Oh and there's Johnny Anderson. He's the one that wrote that<br />
crazy...<br />
<br />
This was our building.<br />
<br />
David: That was the greenhouse garage building that we started. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: And there was a hole. Was it you or my brother that made a hole in<br />
the wall for an air conditioner?<br />
<br />
David: It was your brother.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And the building was painted white after...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is that the air conditioner? You comment about the low tech air<br />
conditioning.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, that was in an actual window. This building had been painted<br />
white after and right about here a hole had been made in the wall<br />
for this through-the-wall air conditioner. It was rented and when<br />
we moved out, we had this hole in the wall. So, my brother takes<br />
this spare ceiling panel that we had. It was white and sort of<br />
stuffed it in the hole and filled it up so that it really didn't<br />
show any more. We never heard any more about it.<br />
<br />
David: That building today is...<br />
<br />
Betsy: They've made it very fancy.<br />
<br />
David: Oh my gosh! It's a boutique shop and it's really nice. And they<br />
didn't even tear it down. It wasn't a tear-down and rebuild. At any<br />
event, we were not into spending money on facilities. Absolutely<br />
not. The last place that we were in was a printing company had<br />
owned it and they had taken three very small houses that backed up<br />
to railroad tracks and then they built a large warehouse at the end<br />
that was relatively modern. Then they just connected the three<br />
houses with little walkway and so we were in the first house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You couldn't tell that it was two houses.<br />
<br />
David: No. The art department was in the second, then the software group<br />
was in the third one. We had our fulfillment and storage and stuff<br />
in the warehouse.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How much money did you spend on the facility?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not much.<br />
<br />
David: We were spending money on expansion, growing, grow, grow. Then Ziff<br />
Davis comes in, they say, "You got this wonderful warehouse."<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's our warehouse now, right?<br />
<br />
David: That's right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It wasn't though, because you owned it.<br />
<br />
David: I know, but in any event, they said we're going to use it. We're<br />
moving some of your operation, advertising, sales into New York,<br />
therefore you will have more space. It wasn't the trade-off of the<br />
same kind of space or anything. What they did is, they have all<br />
these other magazines at that point, things like "Popular Boating"<br />
and "Yachting" and everything else. All of those magazines, when<br />
you subscribed you got a premium. You got a tote bag or something.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A backpack or a cushion.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. They moved all of their premium fulfillment out to our<br />
warehouse. They said, "Because you're not going to have a software<br />
department anymore, so you won't have to ship any software. We're<br />
going to bring all of our premiums out there." We still have<br />
"Yachting" bags.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yachting bags and seat bags.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Speaking of fulfillment that was something that we did. We were<br />
real pioneers in doing our own fulfillment.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: That's true...<br />
<br />
Betsy: All magazines then used fulfillment houses. You would just send all<br />
the little cards and white mail and everything to your fulfillment<br />
house and they would just take care, enter it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Reader service cards and...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Exactly, and then they would send the labels.<br />
<br />
David: Everything went either to Boulder, Colorado, Des Moines, Iowa, or<br />
some place in Florida.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So when you say pioneers, does that mean you were cheap?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well no, because we were not getting good service, we weren't happy<br />
with the service the readers were getting. And so we decided to<br />
bring it in it house, and we brought a program from a company in<br />
Boston that had written a program to run a PDP11.<br />
And we did we brought the whole thing in-house. We had our own data<br />
entry people. Did all the caging, taking the money out in-house.<br />
Printed our own labels and ship, because then you had to print them<br />
and ship them because there was no electronic delivery.<br />
<br />
David: You know we were real pioneers there and we did spent some money.<br />
Because PDP1170 was not a low-end, with a platter and disk, 12<br />
inch, maybe 15 inch, but a big, big platter drive, and data entry<br />
terminals, DECWriters, VT05. And when Ziff came in, I mean they<br />
were blown away that we were doing our own fulfillment, and doing a<br />
very efficiently.<br />
And the other thing we were doing also was the reader service<br />
cards. We were doing all our own processing of that. The same<br />
computer is same system. A Mini Data System, that's what it was.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No.<br />
<br />
David: No? OK.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mini data was the one you were using...<br />
<br />
[Day 2]<br />
<br />
<br />
David: A couple of the questions you asked yesterday got us to thinking<br />
about things we probably should have mentioned or clarified.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK let's go, let me grab a pen.<br />
<br />
David: One of the corrections, Betsy remembered better than I. the<br />
embezzlement that we were talking about was actually 79 not 78 it<br />
doesn't make a lot of difference but was a year later. It was a<br />
year after I had left my day job, and I was really depending upon<br />
Creative Computing for my income and everything else. So to lose<br />
that was a big blow at that time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So that could have been the end of things right there?<br />
<br />
David: Yes absolutely it could have.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was 79 not 78, is what you're saying.<br />
<br />
David: That's what I said it was 79 not 78.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I was going to ask you to move closer to the microphone.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Actually I don't have to do this. My ego is completely uninvolved.<br />
I would go sit and play with the cats.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Please, please be here. You supplement Dave's memory.<br />
<br />
David: Yes exactly she's very good at that.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: I want to know, how are you going to know how to spell things? He<br />
used the name John Dilks. If you go to write it out, how do you<br />
know how to spell John Dilks?<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'll either Google it, and if it's not in Wikipedia, I'll have to<br />
come back to you and ask, or if they're mentioned in the magazines.<br />
I'll do my best.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm not saying it in a critical way, I'm just impressed that you<br />
don't ask.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just feel this way, I can have everything. I don't have to write<br />
it down. I can concentrate on the conversation, rather than taking<br />
notes.<br />
<br />
David: OK. One thing I thought would be kind of worthwhile...putting the<br />
whole era of the early computer magazines into a perspective. In a<br />
sense, personal computing itself went through several eras as it<br />
accelerated and became so widespread. It certainly didn't start<br />
that way.<br />
You almost have to look at a period before there were personal<br />
computers -- the pre-personal computer era, which I would say would<br />
be 1972 or so up through '75, when the first computers came out.<br />
What was happening then was you had big time-sharing systems.<br />
<br />
Then, manufacturers like DEC and HP were making smaller time-<br />
sharing systems for terminals on a computer. Specifically, Bob<br />
Albrecht opened up People's Computer Company down in San Carlos,<br />
San Mateo, one of the "Sans." It was an open to the public place.<br />
What were people going to do with computers? Well, he wrote this<br />
book of what to do after you hit return, of games.<br />
<br />
Then I wrote my book, not for his center, but for people in the<br />
east that had access to the same type of things on DEC computers.<br />
Those two books actually came out in '72. That was well<br />
before....There was an impetus for people to use computers. Even<br />
though it was mini-computers and they didn't really have their own,<br />
they did have access.<br />
<br />
That, I think, was an important thing because, then, when the kit<br />
computers first came out, which is '75, we really had the kit<br />
computer era from '75 to around '78. That's when it primary was,<br />
the do-it-yourself, build-it-yourself.<br />
<br />
Who did those computers appeal to? It was largely people who were<br />
OK with things like soldering guns. That was largely HAM radio<br />
people. You look at "73" magazine and "Radio Electronics," those<br />
were the ones that dragged the hardware people into the field, and<br />
"Popular Electronics," of course, with the Altair in January, '75.<br />
<br />
You had to know something about, and be a little bit capable with<br />
your hands to get into it. That continued but dwindled off by 1980,<br />
because of course, in '78, you had the three biggies, not biggies,<br />
but self-contained, assembled computers: the Commodore PET, TRS-80,<br />
and the Apple all came out in '78. They were proprietary platforms,<br />
nobody was sharing stuff.<br />
<br />
Actually, the S-100 bus was more shareable. More people got a card<br />
that you could plug into the S-100 bus. There was more, but on the<br />
other hand, you had to build it. That was really a stumbling block<br />
for a lot of people. Then processor technology with the SAL. OK,<br />
here's an S-100 bus machine, but it's all built. That was a big<br />
leap.<br />
<br />
Anyway, you had the, what I call, proprietary era from '78 to '82.<br />
Then it kind of dwindled off, although Apple certainly kept going.<br />
When the IBM PC came out, '81, '82, '83, that ushered in the<br />
standardization era. Everybody, "OK, we're going to make an IBM PC<br />
clone." It was really only Apple, and to a lesser extent, the Atari<br />
and the Commodore that kept going with their own proprietary stuff.<br />
They really couldn't keep going.<br />
<br />
At that time, we started working with Atari. They using the same<br />
chip that Apple had. I thought, "Man, that's an opportunity. Why<br />
don't they just make an agreement with Apple to run Apple software<br />
and everything." They got a 6502, that family of chips in there,<br />
why not? But that wasn't Atari's way of doing things, as you well<br />
know.<br />
<br />
In any event, they went through those stages. As a new one came<br />
along, the other one died off. That though then affected the<br />
magazines, Creative Computing, we came from the pre-era, in a<br />
sense. From the education applications and people having access to<br />
small, minicomputer time sharing systems. When Altair basic was<br />
announced, then it was the obvious thing that we would port over<br />
programs to that.<br />
<br />
Other magazines such as "Byte" and some of the hardware magazines,<br />
they really came from the HAM radio end of things. Wayne Green, who<br />
started "Byte," was publishing "73," which was the biggest magazine<br />
in HAM radio. HAM fests were one of the earliest places where<br />
computers were, or at least hardware, do-it-yourself computers were<br />
really seen and popularized. Wasn't till a little later that we had<br />
computer festivals.<br />
<br />
The real early computer festivals in '75, '76, had a big overlap<br />
with Ham radio. The early ones in New Jersey. That was the earliest<br />
ones. It was, I think, more, not more, but at least half was<br />
oriented to Ham radio. Then, it broadened out, of course, with more<br />
applications being reproduced. Anyway, I think it's kind of<br />
important to know how things fit into that whole scheme of things.<br />
<br />
Magazines either came from the Ham radio and hardware side of<br />
things. They had a different perspective than those like Creative<br />
Computing.<br />
<br />
Well, Peoples' Computer Company, Bob Aldberg, could have had a real<br />
winning magazine, but he was too much in the alternative mode. So,<br />
Peoples' Computer Company never really made it as a magazine. He<br />
didn't want to do advertising or anything that would...<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was a different avenue. It was more like a tabloid-style<br />
newspaper.<br />
<br />
David: Newspaper, yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was more glossy.<br />
<br />
David: Exactly.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was a very different field.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Again, magazine publishing. I remember, early on, I was on a<br />
TV show. McNeil Lehrer Report on Public Broadcasting. Life Magazine<br />
was being re-launched and Time-Warner was spending a ton of money<br />
on this re-launch. They had the publisher of Life Magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was probably Time-Life back then. I don't think it...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. That's right. It wasn't Time. Well, I think it was close to<br />
the time that they merged. Anyway. Yeah. It was Time-Life. Then,<br />
they had me. Sort of the opposite extreme.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You're going to be covered in cat hair by the time you're here.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, I am sure.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's OK. But it matches and sort of goes with it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. It matches fine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You have kind of a theme here. The black and white.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes. Yes. Sorry to interrupt.<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, they were interviewing both of us. They were going to spend<br />
more money on their first issue than our entire annual budget, for<br />
everything. The difference in big publishers, because we we're<br />
talking about that a little bit yesterday, is huge. Really huge.<br />
Now, the interesting thing is there was a magazine back then. I<br />
don't know if it's still around today, called Folio. It was a<br />
magazine for magazine publishers. They covered all aspects of it.<br />
Subscription fulfillment, typesetting and everything else and the<br />
business aspects of running a magazine.<br />
<br />
They had some figures, which were true for a long period of time.<br />
That one out of seven magazine startups makes it for one year. One<br />
out of seven. That's low. Of those, one out of seven makes it for<br />
five years. So, were talking about...<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think Wayne told me almost the exact same statistic.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. One out of 50 new magazines makes it for five years or more.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: Once you make it five years, you're probably good to go for awhile.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
The new Life Magazine comes back, roaring back in. Where are they<br />
today, or even 10 years later from that point. Gone. Didn't make<br />
it. In any event, yesterday we were talking a little bit about<br />
where did we put all our money.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
David: Well, all our money wasn't an awful lot compared to big publishers.<br />
We were a small player. We're big in that field, but...<br />
<br />
Kevin: You're a big fish in a little bowl.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Yeah. There wasn't a lot. Betsy reminded me this morning that<br />
one of the things we did to, in a sense, keep control, is we bought<br />
our own typesetting equipment.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Used of course.<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Used.<br />
<br />
David: Used. Yes. We didn't want to send stuff out to a typesetter<br />
where...what did you [inaudible 00:14:22] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was the same thing with the fulfillment. You are sending it to a<br />
service that gives your work to a minimum wage person who couldn't<br />
care less. Puts her time in and...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Plus you still had code and things that needed to be done right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Done right. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Otherwise it was useless.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. We didn't typeset the code usually. We would actually pace<br />
down the printouts. Part of it was for efficiency and probably, in<br />
the long run, it was cheaper. Just to turn your typesetting around,<br />
send it out and wait for your galleys to come back. Then you<br />
proofread them. Then you'd send it back. Then they make the<br />
corrections maybe and you get it back again. So we said, well...and<br />
then we got this used, copy graphic was it?<br />
<br />
David: Mm-hmm. Yep.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Typesetter. Found a young woman who knew typesetting and hired her.<br />
We bought our own stat camera. We always used to have to send all<br />
the stats and [inaudible 00:15:34] out to be made.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: That was huge then before...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Had our own darkroom.<br />
<br />
David: ...everything was computerized publishing. Yeah. We had our own<br />
darkroom and our own stat camera with the thing that goes over a<br />
screen basically to make it into dots.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: To do that. To make those negatives or [inaudible 00:15:56] , which<br />
are the positive. That was something again. You sent it out and you<br />
get it back.<br />
I said, "Oh, you know what, we got a little more type here than<br />
expected. We want to crop this. Well, we send it out again, and oh<br />
my gosh." Doing all of that in-house, but it cost money. In a<br />
sense, just for the hardware and capital improvements that you<br />
needed to do that.<br />
<br />
We were spending it on that and expansion into other things like<br />
the software. One of the other ones that I was thinking of that we<br />
did, that certainly, really didn't bring us any tangible reward,<br />
was that we were doing some consulting when we started developing<br />
software. We started doing consulting to places like the<br />
Exploratorium in San Francisco. And Sesame Place. That was a big<br />
one for us.<br />
<br />
Sesame Place was a theme park right in our own backyard in New<br />
Jersey. They were going to have these terminals that you could go<br />
up to. One of the programs was Mix and Match the Muppets. You could<br />
take different parts of Muppets and combine them. We wrote a part<br />
of that routine and a whole bunch of stuff that made computers and<br />
these things not computers but approachable things for kids.<br />
<br />
We did some work for the Capital Children's Museum in Washington<br />
and Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Again, did it help us?<br />
Maybe. Did we gain a little reputation? Maybe. Did it translate to<br />
the bottom line? Probably not. As Betsy said, it was fun for you to<br />
do that, wasn't it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, it was fun. It gave him fun things to do.<br />
<br />
David: That was one way that we, in a sense, spent some money.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It makes sense. You guys were the computer experts, probably by<br />
orders of magnitude. Who are they going to go to?<br />
<br />
David: That's right. Interactive games, yeah. I already had a good selling<br />
book out there that was visible, known. We did a lot of that kind<br />
of stuff. Some of it was just fun to do. Another place where we put<br />
I won't say a lot of money but we went to a lot of these shows,<br />
well, there were some that were strictly personal computer shows,<br />
but then also tried to push into things like the consumer<br />
electronics show.<br />
We were the only magazine at the consumer electronics. That's a<br />
huge, huge show. Twice a year, one in Chicago and one in Las Vegas.<br />
We'd take the smallest booth that you could but, still, it was a<br />
fair chunk of change to go to that, but that's how I felt we got<br />
the reach. They were pushing at a lower level. That was video games<br />
mostly at that point. Although we weren't in that market, I just<br />
felt that that was someplace that we wanted to be.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you think that was worthwhile?<br />
<br />
David: I don't know. We were mainly looking for retail stores to sell the<br />
magazine. That was my main purpose for going there. No, it probably<br />
wasn't. It probably was not and it cost us a lot of money to go to<br />
the shows. You have to experiment and do those things. We started<br />
reporting on new developments at the consumer electronics show and<br />
there was some overlap with Computer Inc but it was mostly video<br />
games. No, it didn't have a real good payoff. [laughs]<br />
Then there was the Boston show we went to where Betsy's feistiness<br />
really came out. You go to those shows. I'm not talking about one<br />
of these local computer shows or something. You go to a big show.<br />
You've got to use union labor. We had a computer at our booth. We<br />
wanted to plug it in. You're going to plug in your computer? No,<br />
you can't plug it in. You've got to hire an electrician for an hour<br />
for $75 to plug in your computer.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was a bit extreme. I don't think that was actually true.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know how much it was but you had to use union labor for<br />
different things. Betsy took exception to that at one show and<br />
actually came to blows.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was carrying stuff off the show floor. We were trying to get out.<br />
It was in Boston and we were going to drive back and we were trying<br />
to...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Go home at the end of the show?<br />
<br />
Betsy: ...go home at the end of the show. We were just carrying our<br />
cartons of leftover magazines and books and some union guy comes to<br />
me and starts telling me you can't do this and he was being very<br />
rude. So I punched him in the arm. [laughs] They were not happy.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you have to hire a special punching person to do that?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yes, exactly. I should have consulted with the shop steward before<br />
doing that.<br />
<br />
David: There was a follow-up to that. I'm not absolutely sure but I think<br />
the guy that was running that show was Shelley Adelman. He then<br />
approached us after that little incident. You can't do this. Betsy<br />
was really in his face about come on. We're a tiny little nit. Sure<br />
we can do it. We can carry our own stuff.<br />
Shelley Adelman, whose name you probably heard today, in a sense,<br />
got his start by running these smaller shows around the country and<br />
then he built up to running PC Expo in New York and Las Vegas and<br />
then he got into you run a show in Las Vegas you've got to make<br />
deals with the hotels and so on.<br />
<br />
The earlier PC shows in Las Vegas did not use the convention<br />
center. They were held in I think probably the Hilton. He got to<br />
know hotel people there and he started buying into hotels and today<br />
Shelley Adelman is huge. Not Caesars but he owns one of the really<br />
big casino operations. He's on Forbes list of top 100 wealthiest<br />
Americans.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sure he only uses union labor.<br />
<br />
David: I'm sure he does, absolutely. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's how he got where he is.<br />
<br />
David: We've crossed paths with some interesting people in different ways.<br />
There was another one I was thinking of. Actually, this is jumping<br />
around a little bit. Editorial, in different people submitting<br />
articles and then some people I would ask would you do something<br />
for us early, early on. That's another thing we went to. I went to<br />
comic cons and the sci-fi cons to promote the magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was early.<br />
<br />
David: That was early, very early. I've got to tell you one little<br />
incident there. I also went to small press publisher conventions. I<br />
went to one over Labor Day weekend, and I don't know what year it<br />
was. It was probably '75, '76 maybe. The place that they gave this<br />
small press to exhibit was one platform up in the subway under<br />
Lincoln Center.<br />
Lincoln Center, of course, huge, but down one level is not shops.<br />
There may be a few shops but it was a big, open platform. That's<br />
where we were exhibiting. I had my magazines out there on a table<br />
and I was talking to these other underground publishers and so on,<br />
typical.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's why they put you there. It's underground.<br />
<br />
David: Underground, yes. It was a Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Saturday,<br />
Sunday, Monday. I said, "I can't be here on Sunday." Talked to the<br />
person next to me and I said, "I'm just going to leave a cigar box<br />
that says put your money in the box." He said, "You're nuts. We're<br />
in a New York subway system. You're going to come back with nothing<br />
in your box." I left a bunch of change in it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: And your ex-wife said you were too trusting.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] Yes. I left like 15 single dollar bills in there so people<br />
could make change and I just left it there, from Saturday to Monday<br />
and I came back Monday, about $40, $50 in the box. I don't know<br />
whether it paid for everything that was taken but it worked out<br />
fine. Yes, I was obviously too trusting, but at roughly the same<br />
time there was something going on. I think it was a sci-fi<br />
convention or world future society. Yeah, it was world future<br />
society convention.<br />
They had some notable people there. I was sitting down with Alvin<br />
Toffler in the lobby of the Colosseum and along comes over to us<br />
Isaac [inaudible 00:27:03] (ED: from context, they are talking about<br />
Isaac Asimov). What a wonderful little party. We had some coffee in<br />
the Colosseum and I said, "Isaac, can you write me an article?"<br />
"I got a good story from the robot series that hasn't been widely<br />
used or published and you can use that." So I got an early <br />
contribution from Isaac [inaudible 00:27:27] and Alvin<br />
Toffler wrote something for us.<br />
<br />
Anyway, got to know some interesting people at that point. Then who<br />
should submit an article, and by this time Betsy was the editor...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Out of transom comes an article from Michael Creighton. It was a<br />
program. I can't remember what it was about.<br />
<br />
David: For the Apple.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was a program for the Apple, but it was something really dumb.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know if you remember, we were reminded when Harry Garland<br />
was up at the thing in Seattle. Harry Garland was one of the first<br />
ones to produce an independent manufactured a board, a 100 bus<br />
board, for the Altair, and this was really early, and he called it<br />
the TV Dazzler. It made little squares light up but he could make<br />
lots of them light up in different colors or just a few. It was a<br />
silly program but people said we can do graphics on this.<br />
He eventually developed it into quite an interesting graphics tool,<br />
I guess. People did buy the TV Dazzler for itself but the purpose<br />
was here's a board you could produce graphics, do some graphics. In<br />
any event, that's essentially what Michael Creighton's program did<br />
for the Apple. Not much.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This was not early on.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, it was after the Apple 2 was out.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was probably...<br />
<br />
David: '80.<br />
<br />
Betsy: 1980, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you publish it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. I rejected it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: I'm like we're going to reject an article from Michael Creighton?<br />
<br />
Betsy: We both liked Michael Creighton as an article.<br />
<br />
David: Oh my gosh. But we did. We really did. We had standards.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Later on, though, he wrote something. It was better. It wasn't<br />
great. He did write something better and we did accept it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Orson Scott Card wrote for Compute, I think. I don't know if he was<br />
Orson Scott Card at that point, but [inaudible 00:30:00] .<br />
<br />
David: We've crossed paths with some people.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [inaudible 00:30:09] was actually very nice<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, 6 foot 8, big guy. He was very nice. Unfortunately, he died.<br />
On the other end of things, early on, we really were...this was<br />
probably even before Betsy got in...kind of in the small press<br />
underground publishing movement as much as in the legitimate big<br />
magazines, because that's kind of where I started.<br />
<br />
Betsy: When I came, we had just published the first sleek, coated paper<br />
magazine and coated stock. In October 1978, I believe, that was<br />
published. That was the first of the coated stock. That was kind of<br />
the bridge to legitimacy.<br />
<br />
David: For the first two years, [inaudible 00:31:09] news print and I had<br />
a little tie in with some of the small press people. I was learning<br />
about publishing from small press review, I got to know some of the<br />
people who were doing successful publishing. A lot of them were<br />
magazines and comics out of San Francisco.<br />
So I got to know a little bit [inaudible 00:31:46] and Gilbert<br />
Shelton and Sherry Flannigan, and some of those early, Bobby<br />
London. So anyway, one ad we ran real early on was an adaptation of<br />
Renee and Robert Crompton. Go ahead and change my thing to creative<br />
computing. Go for it. Sherry Flannigan she did a comic strip called<br />
Tronch and Bonnie, Tronch was a little dog and Bonnie was a little<br />
girl and they occasionally got mixed up with a robot dog.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there some sort of falling out with that person?<br />
<br />
David: With Sherry? No. I'm still friends with her on Facebook. They had a<br />
major, major problem, she was involved with Gary Hallgrin and I<br />
forget who the publisher was, McNeil, Bobby London. They were the<br />
Air Pirates funniest group that Disney took to task, that caused<br />
the death of a lot of publishing in the underground comics<br />
movement.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I don't understand.<br />
<br />
David: Air Pirates were funny, they were just looking for trouble. They<br />
had Disney characters flying planes and getting into all kinds of<br />
trouble and getting into problems that Disney characters never<br />
would have done, sexual problems as well as just acting badly.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Disney just said, "We can't put up with this." It was an<br />
interesting case, because was it a copyright violation, not really<br />
because they were character look-a-likes, but they weren't calling<br />
them Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck but they looked the same or very<br />
similar. But, it was a landmark case in underground comics, it<br />
caused a lot of them to pull back, a lot on the satire and stuff<br />
that they were publishing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I asked about Sherry because a number of years ago when I had first<br />
put the best of [inaudible 00:34:29] on my website, then after a<br />
while I got an email saying, "Look, you have to take this<br />
[inaudible 00:34:37] ." I would copyright all, it was just like<br />
waving arms. So I took it down but it was, I thought, maybe it<br />
was...<br />
<br />
David: Well that whole copyright trademark thing, there interpretation<br />
that really, really strict...everything that goes on the Internet<br />
is a public domain. Well, that is not really true either. Are you<br />
making money from copyrighted material? If you are then that's a<br />
pretty clear violation. Are you affecting the copyright owners<br />
ability to make money with it? That's a violation.<br />
I'm kind of in this right now with Uruguay and TinTin, those books<br />
have inspired a lot of people to make parodies and fake TinTin<br />
covers. TinTin at the beach, places TinTin wouldn't normally go.<br />
Well is it affecting the sales of TinTin books, or is it actually<br />
increasingly them?<br />
<br />
Casterman, who owns and [inaudible 00:36:07] owns the TinTin<br />
copyrights. They are really going after some of these people, but<br />
I'm not sure that they have a really good case. So some people take<br />
everything off and don't want nothing on the website. And others<br />
are saying, "Hey, this is legitimate." I have collected a lot of<br />
those covers, and put them up on a website.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I guess you'll find out soon enough.<br />
<br />
David: I will find out, soon enough.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They may not be right legally, but how hard do you want to fight<br />
it.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: I think that they have to demonstrate that it's hurting them in<br />
some way. One last thing, from the question you asked yesterday,<br />
back to the money issue, when I sold the magazine, right at that<br />
time I took 15 percent of what I had received, and donated it to<br />
charities. I have in a sense signed on, although not as an official<br />
signee to the Gates-Buffet initiative to give away half of my<br />
wealth, while I am alive.<br />
At one point in time you can compute that, I have already given<br />
away more than I have received for Creative Computing to Charity.<br />
Of course, it had grown a little bit and we made reasonably decent<br />
investments and that is why it continued to grow. But, I'm really<br />
committed to doing that. My kids are not going to inherit it all.<br />
That's just the way it is, that is the way I believe. Put my money<br />
where my heart is. Anyway,<br />
<br />
Kevin: Other question is, you said something yesterday, I should follow up<br />
that one. You said something about stealing Basic.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well there was this big thing. Just the night before last, at this<br />
dinner we went to, where all the people who were at the first MITS<br />
conference and they referred to the letter that Bill Gates wrote.<br />
<br />
Kevin: "Why are you stealing my software?"<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well exactly. That was just a reference to that Bill Gates, which<br />
had just been brought back to my memory by that. People were<br />
telling stories at this. Instead of having an after dinner speaker<br />
they were just passing the mic around and people were talking about<br />
incidents and things from the past.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you get to sell the story to this group of...?<br />
<br />
David: Not really, I was just followed up on something [inaudible<br />
00:39:24] .<br />
<br />
Betsy: Some of those stories were really boring.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: Oh yeah, long and boring. It's an interesting thing though, about<br />
basic itself, but it was developed at an educational institution<br />
originally by Kemeny and Kurtz at Dartmouth. And they, either<br />
deliberately or because they had gotten a lot of grant money from<br />
General Electric in the early time sharing systems, they basically<br />
let anybody use their Basic.<br />
It was developed at Dartmouth but later Honeywell put a system in<br />
at Minnesota or Florida or someplace else. They could use Basic,<br />
they could have a no license fee or anything. That made Basic a<br />
universal language that was available, at least that version of<br />
Basic. If you write a different version of Basic, where does that<br />
fall? These are some sort of violation and you need some<br />
permission. And basically Kemeny and Kurtz said, "No, you don't."<br />
And they allowed Basic to be used and developed by others.<br />
<br />
Digital Equipment, at the same time, maybe even earlier, but<br />
roughly the same time, had developed also an interactive language<br />
called Focal. And Focal in many regards was more efficient than<br />
Basic, because they were running it on many computer and there was<br />
less memory to work with. On the other hand, and this was true<br />
Digital...as time went on, they said, "No, nobody can use Focal. We<br />
are not going to let, especially those people [inaudible 00:41:59]<br />
." But any place else, nobody could use Focal.<br />
<br />
I think it wound up with a situation like Sony and Betamax. Sony<br />
saying, "Betamax is ours and it is a better format that VHS," which<br />
it was. But then, JVC saying, "We have VHS and Toshiba. Hey do you<br />
want to use it? Fine, we'll license it to you for next to nothing."<br />
<br />
Kevin: You think Focal could have been Basic.<br />
<br />
David: I think it could have been very big. I think it could there could<br />
have been very serious competition between the two languages, but<br />
by Digital limiting it only to their own computers and specifically<br />
to their mini computers, not even the big mainframes, it really<br />
limited the spread of Focal. In fact, it forced me to go out to the<br />
developers and people in educational institutions they wanted<br />
Basic.<br />
There were few schools and colleges in Boston area, near DEC that<br />
were OK with Focal. But stuff was getting published by Minnesota<br />
Educational Computer Consortium and others in Basic, [inaudible<br />
00:43:32] computer project. So they wanted Basic. [laughs] I had to<br />
go on. I hired one group, actually it turned out to be just an<br />
individual guy in Brooklyn that developed a Basic for 4KPDP8. Well<br />
Basic took 3.5K, I gave you 500 words, 512 bit not even the 16 bit,<br />
at least get 2 bits per...but 500 words the right programs. Wasn't<br />
much.<br />
<br />
So that forced Lunar Lander and [inaudible 00:44:15] and some of<br />
those programs actually. Some of them I imported over from Focal<br />
into Basic. And then we had a machine that had 8K. We had a<br />
different version of Basic because Hewlett Packard had a machine<br />
that read cards, mark sense cards. We had to have a different<br />
version of basic for that. Then we had a timeshare Basic. We had<br />
six versions of Basic, five actually on the PDP8 family. It was<br />
absurd, it was crazy, but we had to do it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I was going to ask you, the process of like...you started<br />
saying...you interrupted yourself. You said, "People would submit<br />
articles and then..." I don't know what you were going to say next.<br />
But [inaudible 00:45:08] that I wanted to ask you like just the<br />
process of how the magazine got made. You got an article was,<br />
somebody just typed up or something and...<br />
<br />
Betsy: You mean the mechanics of the production?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We can receive most of the articles for the magazine came over the<br />
transom. And we would get these articles and our editorial system<br />
would log them in and pass them around to editorial staff. John<br />
Anderson and Russell [inaudible 00:45:42] .<br />
<br />
David: Peter Fee.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Peter Fee.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What does it mean over the transom?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Means they weren't solicited. Somebody in the middle of the night<br />
jumped to know [laughs] or through the mailbox. We put a little<br />
piece of paper on there and the guys would write their opinions.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] That is serious.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Some of the things they said. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Like what? What would they say?<br />
<br />
Betsy: "Don't quit your day job." [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: And then they had the rubber stamp.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Somebody found a stamp. Everything that we had was used, including<br />
our desk and everything. And somebody found, at the back of the<br />
desk, a stamp. It said San Marcos on it. This was like the ultimate<br />
insult. [laughs] San Marcos, like you know, "Get out of here."<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Send it to San Marcos?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Send it to San Marcos, wherever that was. Ultimately, I would make<br />
the final decision whether we were going to publish this or not.<br />
Once we were well established, the vast majority of them went back.<br />
We never returned manuscripts. And they would come with piles of<br />
code. A lot of them were programs and, we would decide and the<br />
editorial assistants job to notify the person. Then we bought all<br />
rights, didn't we?<br />
<br />
David: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
Betsy: North American Serial rights, that's what we bought for everything.<br />
Then they would go into a cube. Sometimes we would say something,<br />
"Oh, this is going to go really well with this educational<br />
institute that we're doing in June," Like that one is for June or<br />
just put it in the queue and we will see when it comes or rises to<br />
the top or whatever.<br />
The more technical editors like, John Anderson, he was our best guy<br />
ever. They would go through the code and make sure the code worked,<br />
and I would edit them for content and correct them.<br />
<br />
David: For English and Grammar.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, with a pen and pencil. Then they would go to our typesetter.<br />
Typesetter would correct them. And then they would come back, and I<br />
think, our lower level editorial assistant would proofread them,<br />
but proofread a lot of them too. When they came out typesetter, it<br />
was on a smooth shiny paper.<br />
<br />
David: Photographic paper.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And then, if they had screenshots or anything the art department<br />
would make them into photo stats or [inaudible 00:49:02] . And then<br />
when it was time for them to go to press they would put them on<br />
boards, pieces of cardboard, white paper...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So you paste up?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, they do the paste up and put it on there.<br />
<br />
David: The boards were using non reproducing blue on its photograph. They<br />
had different outlines, blue defined columns, both two and three<br />
column pages and upper limits and page numbers and all that kind of<br />
stuff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: We were still doing it on [inaudible 00:49:43] newspaper in 1990.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well that's exactly it, so you know what we're talking about. And<br />
then once you get it all together and then again somebody has got<br />
to read it to make sure there is no lines left out, particularly of<br />
the programs. Make sure that those all still make sense. There were<br />
many cases where line got left out or artists cuts off a things and<br />
realizes, "Oh, I mean to cut it short." And that whole line<br />
disappears and then you send it off to be printed and all the<br />
subscribers get a little upset because Startrek doesn't run.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: So that sort of thing happened frequently or often?<br />
<br />
David: With typeset material, not much at all. But with program listings,<br />
program listings were really tough. Because you would have people<br />
that would submit something, and they'd have a really cheap, low-<br />
end dot matrix printer. And we always encouraged people, if you're<br />
going to submit a program, submit it in some machine-readable form.<br />
So we don't want to type them all in to make sure they work. Even<br />
though our readers are going to have to, but we don't want to have<br />
to do that. So send us. But even so, we might then print it off on<br />
one of our slightly higher end printers. But I'll tell you what,<br />
you have page breaks and everything else. And the Art department<br />
didn't have a clue about programs and stuff. The program would get<br />
stated down. We weren't using the full sized type for program<br />
listings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. At that point we hadn't the ability to make them fit.<br />
<br />
David: That's where the most common place that you'd lose a line or<br />
something. It would get photographed, and when it's coming out of a<br />
line printer, you might have one or two lines on the following<br />
page. "Oh, we forgot that."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Personally, I know it said so much about magazine that when it<br />
continued, there were just sometimes a handwritten area going,<br />
"Continued over here." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Oh, absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was a early.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It wasn't professional, and that was awesome. It was just like,<br />
"OK."<br />
<br />
Betsy: Then what we would do, we would request when we...we would solicit<br />
articles. Like if there was a new Apple peripheral that we wanted<br />
to review, we'd get the product. Then a lot of times, our own guys<br />
wanted to review the stuff, but if it was something that we didn't<br />
have time for, or that was better suited to one of our freelancers,<br />
we would send it out and ask for a review of it.<br />
A lot of reviews came in over the transom too, but we tried to be<br />
careful of those, that they were not either trying to justify their<br />
own purchase of whatever it was or get even with the publisher for<br />
producing it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Or written by the... [crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: That really wasn't an issue at the time, it was a more innocent<br />
time. That really didn't happen much, but it was, sometimes, people<br />
would get a product they didn't care for and totally bash it, then<br />
we have to go and figure out is it really that bad. We tend to not<br />
produce seriously negative...if it was a really bad product we just<br />
ignored it.<br />
<br />
David: We tried to be objective with reviews, but before I got into the<br />
computer field at all I was in market research. There are a number<br />
of biases, too, that really overwhelmingly affect all kinds of<br />
market research polls or surveys. One is that people think they're<br />
better than they are. For example, if we were doing a poll or a<br />
research study, we'd put a question on basically designed to show<br />
the executives who were using this data that there were some<br />
biases.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He's not talking about Creative Computing.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: No, no. This was way earlier. I'm talking about Proctor and Gamble<br />
products or general foods or that kind of thing. Anyways, the<br />
question we put on was "please rank your driving ability," and we<br />
had from well below average, accident waiting to happen up to Mario<br />
Andretti, Danica Patrick, over there. And you know what, 99 percent<br />
of the population ranked themselves better than the average. Where<br />
is your average then? Its way high.<br />
The other thing, equally pervasive in a sense, is that people<br />
wanted to justify a decision, a purchase decision. In fact, back<br />
the 30s, the slogan for Ford Motor Company was ask a man that owns<br />
one. You ask a man that owns and has made a decision to buy this<br />
car, he's going to say "Yeah, it is the greatest car." So you put<br />
on questions, again, throwaway questions.<br />
<br />
If you had this, or if you were an owner of whatever car it is that<br />
you have. "What do you have now? Would you buy another one?" People<br />
"Oh, yes. This is a great decision. I love this car." I'll tell you<br />
where you can find out, is you look at what percentage of people<br />
that did own that particular car did buy another one? They're<br />
always way lower than they those that say they would buy another<br />
one. It gets more pronounced with higher prices.<br />
<br />
If you've made a decision to buy a high-priced car, you're going to<br />
think, "I'll tell you what. This Land Rover was the best car I have<br />
ever bought." 78 percent of people might say, "I'm going to buy<br />
another one." About 15 percent of the people actually do.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So [inaudible 00:56:49] magazine because people want to justify a<br />
review.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. That's exactly right. And as Betsy said, it could go the<br />
other way, too. "I think I'm getting screwed here with this product<br />
and I'm going to knock it." When you get reviews, in essence, over<br />
the transom, they're either justifying, "This was really wonderful.<br />
I made a great decision buying this particular product," or "I hate<br />
it." It's hard to know whether the review was really objective and<br />
realistic.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you ever push-back from advertisers?<br />
<br />
David: All the time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Can you tell me?<br />
<br />
Betsy: We would feel the pushback from our ad sales people. They would say<br />
"So and so is annoyed with you because you didn't put it." We very<br />
rarely put anybody's totally negative reviews, but we tried to be<br />
objective, and not every product is perfect. Almost every product<br />
is going to have some negative feature.<br />
We would put those in and the advertisers would then go to their ad<br />
rep and complain. Then the ad rep would come to us and say, "Why<br />
are you doing this? These people are mad. I have to sell them ads."<br />
We would just say "Separation of church and State. You are<br />
advertising in this magazine because it's a credible magazine, and<br />
if we let you push us around, it won't be credible anymore, and<br />
then it will reflect on your ad."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you remember anyone ever pulling ads [inaudible 00:58:39] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't, offhand. Do you?<br />
<br />
David: No, but I can tell you the opposite. There were a couple of<br />
magazines that almost ran manufactured press releases as product<br />
reviews. They did get more advertising than we did from some<br />
manufacturers that liked that. I hate to name names, but Compute<br />
Magazine. I don't think you'll find any negative reviews in Compute<br />
Magazine. Everything was the greatest thing since sliced bread.<br />
Personal Computing, similar, very positive. "Gee whiz" reviews on<br />
almost all the things that they saw. It just isn't that way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You have talked about [inaudible 00:59:49] . We've talked briefly<br />
at least about the other magazines. Sync, the one about Timex<br />
Sinclair. I understand the allure of publishing a magazine geared<br />
to a specific system, but why did you pick Timex Sinclair? [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Probably two reasons. One is that we had more of a presence in<br />
England than most of the other magazines.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Still do.<br />
<br />
David: We had a very early agreement with David Tebbet, who was the co-<br />
publisher of Personal Computer, something-or-other. It might have<br />
been Personal Computer World. Yes, it was.<br />
<br />
Betsy Ahi: Yes it was Personal Computer World, and when PC world started they<br />
had to call it PC World because there was already a Personal<br />
Computer World in England.<br />
<br />
David: And we had an agreement that they would reprint materials from<br />
Creative Computing, which they did for a while but then they<br />
developed their own in-house capabilities and there was enough<br />
differences. We went to England and very early on had an agent in<br />
England that we could take subscriptions.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A housewife who kept her back issues in her spare bathroom.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we still know her. Hazel Greaves, Hazy. Anyway, so we were<br />
getting enough subscriptions from England. We were sending over, I<br />
don't know how they packaged them up, but they call them Mbags, M-<br />
bags, mail bags basically of magazines, then we mail them from<br />
England. So I had more of our connection with British market than<br />
probably any of the other magazines, we definitely did.<br />
And so I get to know Clarkson Clair and what's going on over there.<br />
And then when they bring over the computer to this country and<br />
Timex, my God, big outfit. They were going to market it. By that<br />
time you know, there was no point starting a [inaudible 01:02:25]<br />
magazine or an entire magazine. They were, Or Apple, they were<br />
already existed. So maybe this is going to be the next big one. We<br />
will be right there when they start and we were.<br />
<br />
Timex actually put, what we had simple, simple sink or something<br />
but it was in the package with the computer. So that was one way of<br />
getting our subscriber base and we couldn't possibly afford to<br />
advertise and do direct mailings for magazine like that. But they<br />
were in essence helping us go on. So that's why it is pretty<br />
successful actually. Often, we were making money on the magazine<br />
mainly because we didn't have to promote it.<br />
<br />
If we had to get subscriptions, we could not have possibly made it<br />
work. There wasn't enough advertising really. I don't know what the<br />
issue here was, but it was not as good as we would have liked it.<br />
The magazine would have been tiny if we maintained the same<br />
advertising to edit ratio we would have liked. But we didn't lose<br />
money out of it but we didn't make anything out of it either. I<br />
think it was a breakeven proposition.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Microsystems. [inaudible 01:04:09] .<br />
<br />
David: I said there was a lot of early development in New Jersey and there<br />
was a guy named Saul Libes, you will find him probably, [laughs]<br />
who was the first president of the Amature Computer Group in New<br />
Jersey. He was a Professor at [inaudible 01:04:43] College and he<br />
felt that Byte magazine started out fine but then they were<br />
focusing more on assembled hardware and things that were already<br />
made.<br />
So he wanted to get down on really lower level of do it yourself,<br />
build it yourself. Microsystems was more like Byte was in the very<br />
beginning, focusing on circuit diagram, this was logic in PC's and<br />
everything.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There first name was S100, Microsystems<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, S100 perhaps then it became Microsystems in '78 or '79. When<br />
some of the others came out they started [inaudible 01:05:45] 6800<br />
and 68,000 chips from Motorola. But I would say it was a really<br />
techy magazine and it was one that I think probably killed that one<br />
off.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was dead before [inaudible 01:06:05] . [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: It might have been. I don't know, but it was...<br />
<br />
Betsy: S100 bus did not survive and to the [inaudible 01:06:12] .<br />
<br />
David: It was dead before as there was these eras and the do it yourself<br />
S100 era,that was '75 to '78. Then it kind of had a downward spiral<br />
of two or three years and it was gone. Well, maybe it wasn't gone<br />
but it wasn't the same. And so Microsystems was tuned into that and<br />
they were running hardcore stuff.<br />
And the reason that Saul...we reach an agreement with him to<br />
publish it, is basically he didn't have any real magazine<br />
background. We thought we could do something with it. It turned out<br />
not to be a good fit bit we published it for a while. I don't know<br />
if we made money or lost money on that. Probably it didn't make<br />
anything. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Small business computers or computing.<br />
<br />
David: What?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Small business computers? Who do we buy that from? I can't even<br />
remember. You can't even remember that we had it, I can tell by the<br />
look on your face<br />
<br />
David: I can<br />
<br />
Betsy: That one of my brothers...my brother was a publisher remember?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I don't know who or where we got it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That just fall into grave or...?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Eventually, but that we post it for a while. I think is something<br />
that somebody basically left on our door step.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think it was kind of like a puppy on the... [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: I think it came with your brother.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, because my brother wasn't into publishing until after clearing<br />
college.<br />
<br />
David: It sounded like a good idea at the time.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think we saw a future in business computing<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we did and unfortunately that was one word as if they just<br />
want...I mentioned yesterday that they wanted to really shift the<br />
focus of Creative Computing away from home and broaden out and<br />
shifted into the small business market. And just did not, it was an<br />
uncomfortable fit. We would've been better to have a separate<br />
magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember where we got Small Business Computing from or<br />
where it went.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know, either.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But I know that obviously it wasn't a huge acquisition.<br />
<br />
David: It was a footnote.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A footnote in the story. [laughs]<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Actually, a bigger acquisition was earlier and that was ROM<br />
Magazine. Rom was published by who? (ED: not the Atari-related<br />
magazine of the early 1980s.)<br />
<br />
Betsy: Erik Sandberg-Diment.<br />
<br />
David: Right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: D-I-M-E-N-T.<br />
<br />
David: Connecticut. He did a nice job with the magazine, very nice job<br />
with it. Published nine issues and a little different focus than<br />
Creative but it really overlapped us very nicely. He had more<br />
graphic stuff. In fact, it was through him that I got to know<br />
George Baker and some of the people up there. The other guy that<br />
did the pixelated blocks photos. You've seen those.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The Einstein.<br />
<br />
David: [crosstalk] The Lincoln with block pics.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Block pics.<br />
<br />
David: Block pics. OK, he and George Baker sort of came as a package with<br />
Rom, they knew of each other. We actually, I would say, four or<br />
five issues, ran Rom as a whole separate section and even set it on<br />
the cover of Creative Computing and Rom. Then it became evident...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think that was because he had a whole other editorial kicking<br />
around. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We bought.<br />
<br />
David: Could be. And then we would just merge it in completely, but that<br />
was a very good fit. It brought us more editorial than it did<br />
subscribers. They did not have a big subscriber base, but it was a<br />
nice marriage in a sense.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Video and Arcade Games only published I think four issues.<br />
<br />
David: Three.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Three?<br />
<br />
David: Actually, three but if you've got a hold of the third one, you're<br />
doing well. I think Ziff cut that off after two real issues got<br />
mailed out. We did a third one but it wasn't sent out to<br />
subscribers.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My website only has two issues.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. There were only two that really were distributed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So I have...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: A goal. [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, if you can get a hold of the third one. [laughter] I don't<br />
even have that. There's a same thing on Atarian. There were three<br />
issues of Atarian that I did not keep the third issue. Oh, man.<br />
Shoot me.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: But Video and Arcade Games, there were at least five or six other<br />
magazines focusing on that. Talk about magazines that were running<br />
non-objective manufacture-provided reviews, all the others were. I,<br />
maybe, convinced myself and some people at Davis that there was a<br />
need for really objective...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ziff? Did Ziff do that?<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Were we with Ziff when we did that?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah. That was a late one. So we said, let's...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Continue it through.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, that was definitely. Let's do it. But again...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not only that but it was going to be fun.<br />
<br />
David: It was going to be a lot of fun. [laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: So why did it fail?<br />
<br />
David: OK, again you got to look at the eras and what was happening.<br />
Arcade games then really were on the decline. Video arcades where<br />
you go in and pop a quarter in, because there was so much more<br />
capability in the home computers and the [inaudible 01:12:55] and<br />
the Mattel and the different home systems. They could do all now,<br />
not as much, but you get a pretty darned good game that you could<br />
take home with you and not have to pop a quarter in the slot every<br />
time you play.<br />
So arcade games were kind of on the downward spiral, so that<br />
eliminated a lot of potential advertising. We weren't going to get<br />
any advertising from Nameco and all of the producers of the arcade<br />
games, which was, "Hey, it is advertising along with..." And the<br />
other home producers of the game, there were four or five magazines<br />
already that they were pouring money into. They didn't really want<br />
another one.<br />
<br />
So it was advertising that or just lack of advertising that killed<br />
that off. We just couldn't get it. I think there was still a need<br />
for what we had sort of in a sense proposed to do of objectively<br />
reviewing games and secondly, we're telling people how to play<br />
them.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, it was strategies.<br />
<br />
David: Strategies. It was advertising that we just didn't have, couldn't<br />
get.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:14:28] Atari explored and Atari I think we've covered<br />
pretty well.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Military vehicles, which we talked about.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] Yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So the other magazines, Byte and [inaudible 01:14:45] , was it<br />
rivalry? Was it friendly competition?<br />
<br />
David: Byte, we were in bed together. Not in bed together, but we<br />
published the best of Byte. Creative Computing did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: For awhile.<br />
<br />
David: Well, just one.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. That wasn't that friendly a rivalry. It wasn't that friendly<br />
after awhile.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't friendly once they sold to McGraw Hill, and they sold<br />
early. Then everything was off. We did some joint promotions with<br />
Byte for hardware creative software. We ran the ads for each other<br />
for a short time.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's when McGraw Hill cutoff.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] In a heartbeat. No more of that.<br />
<br />
David: We felt that basically we weren't even competing for the same<br />
advertisers. Just a few, but not really. Certainly, we were not in<br />
direct competition at all with Byte. So that was just kind of all<br />
in the same place and you're going in a hardware direction, we're<br />
going on the software.<br />
When Wayne Green threw this intrigue with his wife and everything<br />
else, lost Byte Magazine. He was fit to be tied. "I'm going to kill<br />
them!" and he started Kilobyte. It wasn't killable. It was Kilobyte<br />
for I don't know how many issues.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not many.<br />
<br />
David: 1000 bytes. [laughter] and a kilobyte, it had a dual meaning there.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: That was a ferocious and very nasty. Oh, horrible rivalry. Somebody<br />
early on forced him not to use the name byte at all.<br />
<br />
Betsy: So it was byte.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: So they changed it to Kilobaud.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Which didn't mean anything.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: No.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So did you have a relationship with Wayne?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Nobody had a relationship with... [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Nobody really had a relationship. I knew him, of course. He was<br />
going his own way. Now the one area actually where we got into more<br />
competition with him than in the magazine itself, because again, he<br />
was trying to be like Byte, hardware oriented and he published 73<br />
magazines so he was basically focusing on the ham radio people, the<br />
do it yourselfers and so on. But they started a software division.<br />
It was pretty good. They had a lot of the same types of software<br />
that we did on cassette tape.<br />
In any event, we really had more of a head to head rivalry on the<br />
software than in the magazine publishing. We never really had<br />
anything to do with the magazine products or books. They also<br />
published some books but more like the magazine hardware type of<br />
thing. We weren't quite as selective, but our book publishing we<br />
did get into things that weren't in the magazine. We published<br />
books with more of a hardware orientation. We had a little broader<br />
line of books than the type of things that we had in the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I don't know if you want to open this can of worms, but you said to<br />
me in an email, "You couldn't find two people whose vision,<br />
philosophy, ethics, and view of business and life was further apart<br />
than Wayne and I." Can you elaborate on that? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was just basically unpleasant, is my take on him. I didn't know<br />
him that well but it was just sort of like he had a chip on his<br />
shoulder and was daring you to knock it off. Wouldn't you say?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You knew him before I did but by the time I arrived on the scene<br />
that was just sort of the general industry perception of him, I<br />
think. It was just stay away from him, leave him alone, he's not<br />
very nice.<br />
<br />
David: Well, one other thing, which we sort of touched on a couple of<br />
times, I'm very trusting. [laughter] Overly so, according to my ex-<br />
wife and I think there would be a couple of examples. Wayne would<br />
walk out of that door, boy, out of sight, 'you're going to do<br />
something to screw him' is what his view would be. He did not trust<br />
anybody.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] And least of all, his ex wife.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: It's the old saying, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean<br />
that somebody isn't out to get you." He thought everyone was out to<br />
get him, everybody. So we were totally philosophically different.<br />
Our ways of doing business were different. I shake hands with you,<br />
we have an agreement. You don't shake hands with Wayne.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't think his employees were ever happy either.<br />
<br />
David: Oh!<br />
<br />
Betsy: You talked to them and it shows. He didn't have like a great...<br />
<br />
David: Rapport.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well it was not. The culture of his organization I don't think was<br />
particularly, I think it was probably permeated with this lack of<br />
trust.<br />
<br />
David: Well, one thing, we had fun. We really did have fun at Creative<br />
Computing. Perhaps some of the editorial staff, too much. There was<br />
one point where Betsy had to away their...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well they were all young guys. Some of them even still in high<br />
school, they would play games for hours and hours and hours, long<br />
after the reviews were done. It was one, self-contained thing that<br />
played football, and they played it for hours. I had to take it<br />
away from them. Like "don't make me be your mother"<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there any drug culture at all? If you read [inaudible 01:22:17]<br />
and he was cocaine and high everyday and popped...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not that we knew of. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: The East coast was quite different.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No there was nothing, really. I don't think so. In fact, my client<br />
John Anderson and Peter Fee, they were actually kind of protective<br />
of me in a lot of ways. I can remember being in John's office and<br />
they were talking about a movie or something like that. John said,<br />
"No, you wouldn't like this movie, don't go to this movie." That<br />
kind of thing, they were funny guys. They just kept laughing. David<br />
Lubar. They were free spirits but they were very funny, talented<br />
guys.<br />
<br />
David: He is coming out with a line of children's books, weird, weird<br />
stuff. The last one, something about the lawn mower weenies. He has<br />
a line of 6 or 8, and they're all little short stories. Some of<br />
them were adaptations of stuff that almost got published in<br />
Creative Computing, probably some of them did. Lubar is a funny<br />
guy. When he left and went to work for one of the video gaming<br />
companies, his first big successful game was "Worm Wars." You were<br />
like, "Worm Wars?" [laughs]<br />
Other people are fighting real serious warrior and you are fighting<br />
with worms. We just had a different kind of culture, a lot of fun.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Jonny Anderson went to work for A+ in San Francisco. He was one<br />
of the five people killed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1986.<br />
He was in a car and a piece of the building fell on the car. He was<br />
a really funny guy.<br />
<br />
David: We did not have a serious business culture.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, we had this great big room with a bunch of tables set up around<br />
the edges, in the middle. It was kind of like that, nowhere near as<br />
neat.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I will clean that up for you.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] Just tangles of wires, and we had to have one of every<br />
kind of computer so we can test all the software, and this one<br />
would be running this kind of peripheral, and it was like a young<br />
guys dream job.<br />
<br />
David: You commented yesterday about how we had a bunch of high school,<br />
not quite, but still...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I said that they were in their early 20s but they basically had the<br />
maturity of high school students, they needed a little bit of<br />
mothering. But I wasn't that myself. They were just really nice<br />
guys, we did a good job hiring those kids.<br />
<br />
David: When you talk about the Atari cultures and some of the others,<br />
where every Friday some of these companies have parties, that kind<br />
of thing. We had an annual party, a picnic. We didn't need weekly<br />
parties and stuff to let you have fun because that stuff was going<br />
on every day, not really partying but playing the games and<br />
bantering and everything else.<br />
As they say, at Washington, a real efficient business culture.<br />
Heck, I didn't work for Digital Equipment, which was still a pretty<br />
relaxed place, but AT&T which was anything but. This is as far away<br />
from that kind of corporate culture as you can get, but it worked.<br />
Didn't make a lot of money, but it worked.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:26:58]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. And I think they appreciated it because they weren't making<br />
tons of money either, but they were having a lot of fun. They<br />
enjoyed going to work, they really enjoyed it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Speaking of Kindle, I've done it but haven't told anybody yet that<br />
best of Creative Computing too is now available on Kindle. And I<br />
have been working backwards. [crosstalk] I just had it on sale.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I haven't publicized it yet for sale.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They won't let you do. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah, I think they will have two.<br />
<br />
David: Did you do that through Amazon? How do you convert is to Kindle?<br />
I scan them and then I do CRM and I use Elance or utilize some<br />
service in India that converts it back to ASCII, and then they<br />
convert it into an E-book from there. It's a lot of work, I want it<br />
done well, and I want it to be super awesome. And they just<br />
[inaudible 01:28:40] , like we were talking about before.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Outsourcing and stuff. But I can do it myself but that would take<br />
way too long. So I just try to do the quality control [inaudible<br />
01:28:49] . It's not perfect but better than nothing.<br />
<br />
David: I have reached the point where with my Dodge restoration book, that<br />
yes, many of the borders around the pictures are terrible, they're<br />
hand drawn and so on. But I'm not going to bother to re-do that, I<br />
just want take the book, get it into some sort of machine readable<br />
format, PDF or something. [inaudible 01:29:24] somebody that can...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah, I can get you off with that. We can then figure it out.<br />
<br />
David: I found one extra one that I can cut up.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That will help a lot. [inaudible 01:29:37] . If you want to sell a<br />
PDF of it, that would be up in couple of day. That's easy, but a<br />
searchable Kindle version that takes longer.<br />
<br />
David: I don't want a Kindle version because people want to print out<br />
something that they can...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Take out to the garage<br />
<br />
David: When people slide under the vehicle they have it there, "Oh, OK<br />
this is what I should be looking for."<br />
<br />
Kevin: If you scan it and upload it to Amazon, even create space from<br />
[inaudible 01:30:06] company, then there could actually be another<br />
book, that looks pretty identical to the first one. We will figure<br />
out.<br />
Do you [inaudible 01:30:23] ? But are you familiar with...?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Are there any?<br />
<br />
Kevin: There are but they are very different than Creative.<br />
<br />
David: Somebody out there said, "What did you read today?" The only<br />
magazines that I will occasionally pick up in the computer field<br />
are mostly from England, Internet magazines, well there are<br />
several, which is sort of interesting that the dominant Internet<br />
magazines come from England, but they do.<br />
If I want to do something, and I haven't lately, but I wanted to<br />
get into doing something different or interactive or something with<br />
my website. I'd pick up one of those magazines and kind of have<br />
same kind of thing that Creative used to publish. Here is a code to<br />
do it in Pearl or HTML, whatever.<br />
<br />
I converted all of my website, quite a while ago, to XHTML from old<br />
HTML. I did not like any of the programs that generate web pages,<br />
mainly because...Well, today its probably OK, but I felt that<br />
earlier on, they were very inefficient. You'd have this much code<br />
for something and XHTML would write it in five lines.<br />
<br />
My old-fashioned [inaudible 01:32:23] said, "You know what, the<br />
interpreter or compiler or whatever, has to go through a lot of<br />
that just to pick out what is going to be displayed." My web pages<br />
are very compact and short. They are all XHTML, none of that is<br />
extra [inaudible 01:32:41] style pages and everything else.<br />
<br />
Anyway, so that's what I'll pick up a magazine for. I'm was doing a<br />
little bit of programming in Pearl and then I said, "No. You know<br />
what, I can get routines that I can download and I don't have to<br />
learn it myself. I learned enough to know that I don't want your<br />
Pearl program." [laughs] Or what is the other one? I don't know.<br />
I'm right at the point now where I'm wanting to do some more things<br />
that I can't, so I'll probably purchase some more computer<br />
magazines and learn about it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Has anyone talked to you about the purchase of PC by Davis?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is a big story.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: She was involved.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was involved. There was a magazine called PC. I was in San<br />
Francisco.<br />
<br />
Kevin: PC magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: PC Magazine, right. And, there was a guy named Tony Gold and there<br />
was somebody else that I can't remember. There was Tony Gold and<br />
this Mr. X started this magazine and they hired...David Banell will<br />
probably tell you all, I don't know all the details but I'm sure he<br />
has it engraved in his brain.<br />
They hired David Banell to run it and I guess several other people,<br />
and my understanding is, that they told them they were going to<br />
give them a piece of the action, they weren't going to pay them<br />
very much but you're all part owners and everything, but nobody<br />
ever wrote it down.<br />
<br />
So when Ziff Davis approached Tony Gold and Mr. X and wanted to buy<br />
the magazine, and the guys said, "Oh yeah, sure," and they sold it<br />
to him and all these people that were working for them said, "Well,<br />
what about us. We're part owners too." But there was no proof of<br />
it. So Ziff bought it, and they were right in the middle, just<br />
about to go to press with an issue and they got word that it had<br />
been purchased by Ziff.<br />
<br />
So David Banell took just about the entire staff and they walked<br />
out and went across town and started PC World. Apparently their<br />
lawyers said, "Don't take anything with you." So they just walked<br />
out and left the offices as they were, and Ziff, who now had a<br />
magazine to get out and no one to do it, sent me out to San<br />
Francisco for a couple of weeks and there was like an editorial<br />
assistant and a couple of freelance writers, were the only people<br />
left.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So this is when you became the interim.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is how I become the editorial director of PC. So I basically<br />
went out there and walked into this office and had to pull together<br />
their issue and get it off to the printer. They had a big dummy on<br />
the wall where everthing...<br />
<br />
Kevin: They lay all the...<br />
<br />
Betsy: They lay all the impositions where all the pages and the stories<br />
were going to go and they moved everything around. [laughs] But<br />
they couldn't resist.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That is awesome.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This one guy, whose name I wish I could remember. Barry Owen,<br />
worked with me, and we were able to get it off to the printer and<br />
then pack everything up and send it back to New York and then they<br />
hired Barry Owen, he moved to New York and he eventually become the<br />
editor, because that was who they had.<br />
I was sort of the editorial director for a while and they said<br />
that, "If you were going to do this, you would have to come to the<br />
city. We are going to really set up an office here and make it<br />
real." And I said, "No, I am not going to drive into the city every<br />
day or take the train or the bus or anything." It was a interesting<br />
story and we were getting much more interesting version of it from<br />
David Barnell, who was there. [laughs]<br />
<br />
And in the mean time, they were all starting up PC World and taking<br />
all of their freelancers and trying to make it as difficult as<br />
possible for PC. That was a big rivalry, obviously.<br />
<br />
David: And then it created a couple of months of problems at creative too,<br />
because my editor was gone. I had really gotten very dependent to<br />
rely on her for so many things. "I got to edit this myself." And<br />
then the whole question mark was, OK if PC magazine, is she can<br />
stay with it. It was a time of uncertainty.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm sure it was a bad career move.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. But PC magazine still exist.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, exactly. I don't know if I would have existed if I had to<br />
commute to New York, that's a nasty commute. Millions of people do<br />
it but, I just didn't want to be one of them. I didn't mean to<br />
interrupt, so back to you.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What are you most proud of, or everything you have done?<br />
<br />
David: OK, that's obviously not a one word answer. Proud is, I am not<br />
crazy about it. I guess the fact that I continued to hear from<br />
people that said, "Hey, I got my start in computing from Basic<br />
computer games or Creative Computing," or something that I had my<br />
hand in, that makes me feel pretty good.<br />
You have a long term, or longer term influence that just what you<br />
do at the time, it's living on. It's not living on forever. Basic<br />
isn't going to live on forever. But I think the idea that having<br />
some positive influence on other people, on their lives, on their<br />
careers, that's a good.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You helped send people into the computer science field.<br />
<br />
David: And you know the specific individual accomplishments. Yeah, I wrote<br />
a couple of programs that are probably in some cases, maybe not the<br />
program but the routines, are still in use. That's minor compared<br />
to having an influence on people and their career and their<br />
outlook, their future. That's way more important. "OK so I wrote a<br />
great algorithm, so what."<br />
<br />
Kevin: And you really think it's the same algorithm that's being used in<br />
Google maps and...<br />
<br />
David: Portions of it, yeah. But that is minor. I look back and I say,<br />
"Almost anything that I wrote in the last 30-40 years, if I were<br />
doing it today, I would have done it a little differently, but I<br />
didn't know then what I know now." So there's no one thing I could<br />
say, "Oh, that was a really great article, or great insight," or<br />
something. Anything can be improved upon.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sure. That's what disappoints me about computer magazines today is<br />
I don't think that it seems like children going to be able to go.<br />
It's not going to motivate anybody to do anything, other than use<br />
Word version 18 or whatever. There's no Basic programs to type<br />
anymore and it's not exciting.<br />
[cross talk]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Well, [inaudible 01:42:31] was mentioning that at breakfast,<br />
oh gosh that was just yesterday.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was yesterday [laughs] .<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] That kids today don't have any feeling about, or I should<br />
say knowledge about the real basics of bits. What is a bit?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: Nobody knows anymore. He wanted to find some little simple piece of<br />
hardware. Really, I guess he has, that every kid when they're in<br />
the 5th or 6th grade will be exposed to this so they'll have some<br />
concept of what bits are all about. Are you ever going to get that<br />
into schools today? No. So anyway, it's just kind of, hopefully<br />
there's been some long term influence.<br />
And what I'm doing now even, which is mainly developing bible<br />
studies for...well, I mostly have guys that have had a drug or<br />
alcohol addiction problem coming to this. They're in a rescue<br />
mission. I'm hoping that these studies can have a little bit of an<br />
influence on the direction of their lives. They're a positive<br />
influence on where they go from here. So it's kind of, people more<br />
than a specific thing or whatever.<br />
<br />
[pause]<br />
<br />
Those are terrible copies.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They are copies. These are from the scans. I was printing scans and<br />
I wasn't trying to make them pretty. Just for my reasons, it was<br />
quick and dirty. I could've bumped the contrast and stuff.<br />
<br />
David: There's Carl.<br />
[pause]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do have anything left, like how many subscribers you had over time?<br />
Is that data around anymore? How many newsstand copies you had? I<br />
assume that is a lot.<br />
<br />
David: OK, maximum, I think we mentioned that. We hit just about a half a<br />
million before Ziff killed it. Then, they gave people a choice of<br />
three magazines that they expected to continue to publish, PC,<br />
Apple's A+, or Mac User.<br />
I'm guessing that most people went with PC. One of the reasons<br />
actually was Ziff's rationale at that point was, PC World had<br />
really grown a lot and the circulation base of PC World and PC were<br />
very close. They were both about a half million. PC might have had<br />
a small lead.<br />
<br />
Then, by killing Creative Computing and rolling all of those<br />
subscribers, there was some overlap. Certainly, there were some<br />
subscribers that got both magazines. You probably had a quarter of<br />
a million additional subscribers into PC. All of the sudden, they<br />
go to advertise, "We've got three-quarters of a million and PC<br />
World only has half a million."<br />
<br />
That was when PC had a huge growth spurt. You know, they started<br />
publishing those telephone-book-thick issues.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I would think that it probably still holds the record for the<br />
largest magazine ever published, whenever the issue was that they<br />
published it, it was their biggest one. Certainly magazines aren't<br />
getting bigger now. They didn't continue to increase in size after<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: Then they started publishing it twice a month. The nudge that the<br />
subscriber base at Creative, gave to PC really, separated them<br />
completely from PC World. They had their reasons.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. This is a chart of the page count of Creative Computing over<br />
its life. It's not a question, I just made a chart. Every December<br />
there's a peak for the big December issue. Right at the end it<br />
just, all of the sudden, stopped.<br />
<br />
David: Well, that's when Ziff had decided to kill it, which was almost a<br />
year before. They basically let us publish for another eight or<br />
nine months after they had made the decision.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was a lot of back and forth. Are they going to kill it? Are<br />
they not going to kill it?<br />
<br />
David: They weren't promoting, no subscription promotion. They were saving<br />
their money. If you don't promote the subscriptions, you're not<br />
going to get them.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is page count.<br />
<br />
David: It was advertising.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:48:59]<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't actually subscriber base didn't drop them. That's cool.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just thought I'd do a comparison, even though that's not really<br />
what I'm doing here. In the beginning, you guys were bimonthly and<br />
they were monthly. I couldn't know how to do it accurately. Their<br />
page count's actually higher, because they were doing twice as<br />
much. I don't have all the data here. You guys tended to publish<br />
larger issues than "Kilobyte?"<br />
<br />
David: It was so dependent upon advertising. You got some magazines, they<br />
would run 80, 90 percent advertising, if they could. In some<br />
special interest fields, you can get away with that, because people<br />
are actually buying the magazine for the advertising, not for the<br />
editorial content.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [inaudible 01:50:02] , a good example.<br />
<br />
David: That's exactly right. Even what the guys that bought Military<br />
Vehicles, they just went over so heavily to...I always believe that<br />
you should have at least one-third editorial content, preferably<br />
more. They dropped down to 20 percent to edit.<br />
<br />
Kevin: There was one issue, the 10th anniversary issue, I don't mean to be<br />
picking on Wayne here. There was this quote he happened to say,<br />
which I thought was really interesting to me, I wanted to get your<br />
take on it. He said, this is in 1984, "A computer system doesn't<br />
really stand a prayer anymore unless there's at least one<br />
dedicated, independent magazine for its users."<br />
<br />
David: Wayne said that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wayne said that. Is that true? At the time, would you have agreed<br />
with that?<br />
<br />
David: In '84? Again, you've got to look at where we were in the cycle at<br />
that point. The cycle was then, there were more computers dying off<br />
than there were new ones being released. Standardization had come<br />
in really. You've got the IBM PC, and everybody's producing a PC<br />
clone. Apple kept going, and Atari, and Commodore attempted to.<br />
If you were to start a computer company at that point, with a new<br />
computer, yeah, you'd need something to give your user base<br />
something to do with it, more than just what the manufacturer was<br />
selling. So, that's probably accurate. What do you think?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, I think it's accurate. That's what people started to expect.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. Another chord of the same issue which we've kind of touched<br />
on from Tom Dwyer. This is in 1984. He's saying, "Computer<br />
magazines used to have personality [laughter] and now they don't."<br />
Now, they really don't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They really don't!<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think they still have personality in form but now it's just<br />
inconsistent.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Who was Tom Dwyer? I don't remember him.<br />
<br />
David: Tom Dwyer? He was at University of Pittsburgh. He came up with all<br />
those neat applications. He and Margo...He had the best basic<br />
primer of anybody, in fact the only one that both Kemeny and Kurtz<br />
endorsed outside of their own material. He had really written some<br />
good Basic books.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm just finishing up here. The Internet says you were born in<br />
1939. Is that right?<br />
<br />
David: Yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Where were you born?<br />
<br />
David: New York, New York.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent.<br />
<br />
David: I was born in the hospital that my father had a hand in designing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Really?<br />
<br />
David: He was an architect up until the Recession. I think he, perhaps,<br />
designed the restrooms but he wasn't the...<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: When were you two married?<br />
<br />
Betsy: 1988. 25 years ago.<br />
<br />
David: June 18, 1988.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What's your last name now?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mine?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ahl.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I tried keeping this professional thing and it was just way too<br />
confusing, since that really wasn't my name anyway. That was my<br />
first husband's name, and then just...this is way too complicated.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My wife kept her maiden name and now she wishes she hadn't. It's<br />
just confusing. It just made sense to do.<br />
<br />
Betsy: If had been my maiden name, I might have, but it really wasn't.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What haven't I asked you that I should have?<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] We kind of were noodling it around last night and said,<br />
"Man, the guy's thorough."<br />
<br />
Betsy: You the most prepared interviewer ever.<br />
<br />
David: I jotted down a couple of notes. Nope.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Got everything?<br />
<br />
David: What's your thinking? Because originally you were talking to me<br />
about covering Wayne's magazines and so on.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My original thought, when I had put no thought into it, was that it<br />
would be half about Wayne's magazine and half about Creative. First<br />
of all, after talking to him, I thought there's not enough to do<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: Did you talk to Wayne?<br />
<br />
Kevin: I talked to Wayne.<br />
<br />
David: Well that's good to know, right? Carl Helmers didn't know if Wayne<br />
was still alive.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He's still alive.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's true. We asked Carl Helmers if Wayne was still alive and he<br />
was [inaudible 01:56:06] .<br />
<br />
David: Actually, there was another guy up there that published a computer<br />
magazine. What the heck was the name of it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Who are you talking about?<br />
<br />
David: Up in New Hampshire, Peterborough. It was one of the earlier would-<br />
be competitors to Datamation. So, it was much earlier.<br />
He was absolutely totally convinced about the Kennedy assassination<br />
and published a computer analysis of all the photos and everything<br />
else. Every single issue of the magazine had this stuff. He and<br />
Wayne were on the same wavelength on that. You ask Wayne about the<br />
conspiracy. [laughs] You'll get an earful.<br />
<br />
Kevin: In answer to your question. First, it was going to be the two, and<br />
then that happened. Also my wife said, "If you're doing two, then<br />
it's going to seem like a compare and contrast thing." That's not<br />
what I want to do.<br />
Now I'm thinking that this will be a project about the earliest<br />
computer magazines, the first computer magazines. That way, I can,<br />
whatever, four or five chapters. One on Creative, and maybe Byte.<br />
I'm meeting with the editor of Byte in a couple of weeks at an<br />
event, maybe Interface Age or one of the other ones.<br />
<br />
David: If you can find Bob Jones, that would be an interesting contrast.<br />
He was Interface Age. He had a different perspective on a lot of<br />
things, and I had a lot of respect for him. He just didn't sell at<br />
the right time. Too bad. Bob Jones was a very serious, good guy.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Who were the other early people? Dr. Dobbs? I don't know what...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, Dr. Dobbs...<br />
<br />
David: Jim Warren! Oh my goodness. That would give you another perspective<br />
altogether.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's, again, the California...<br />
<br />
David: Jim Warren and Bob Albrecht are tied together very closely. They're<br />
both in sort of in the alternative lifestyle. I don't know what<br />
you'd call it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That probably had Friday afternoon pot parties. [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Oh, boy. Did they ever! Yes, yes. Jim also was the one that started<br />
the West Coast computer fairs. He's a very capable guy. Dr. Dobb's<br />
journal was in a sense, well, you've probably seen it. You have,<br />
right? OK, so you know.<br />
That's really low level programming rather than higher languages.<br />
We're talking about machine languages, assembly language,<br />
programming, and there. It was sort of like Microsystems was to<br />
Byte. Microsystems, for the really serious hardware guy. Dr. Dobbs<br />
was for the really serious programmer, compared to Creative which<br />
was for people who just wanted to type something in that would<br />
work.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:59:35] basic right. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Dr. Dobbs. That was a totally different [inaudible 01:59:43]<br />
competitor.<br />
<br />
David: We didn't compete at all. I had a view that we competed at all with<br />
them; they may have thought we did but I didn't think so.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did they even have advertising?<br />
<br />
David: Oh yeah, actually they did, and it kept going for a long time<br />
because it was a small little nitch magazine. But, yeah, Jim Warren<br />
would be an interesting guy, very interesting guy early on. I don't<br />
know about Albert because you say he published more tabloid<br />
newspapers. I don't know if they ever really published any magazine<br />
size thing or not. Probably not, but it would give me a totally<br />
different perspective because they are coming from the west coast,<br />
looser or whatever.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That sounded pretty loose.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah nothing compared to that.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think he was sort of in rebellion when he started working at<br />
Creative Computing because he was coming off of AT&T where he had to<br />
wear a suit to work every day. So the first thing he did was burn<br />
his suits and wear t-shirt and jeans way before anybody was doing<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: I went extremely in the other direction, yeah I did, but who else<br />
real early. Personal computing which I think David Barnell somehow<br />
involved in it at some point in there. Because they moved from the<br />
west coast to New Jersey, they were bought by...who was that? It<br />
was mostly a company that published things like hardware age and<br />
advertiser-driven magazines. What was the name?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, gosh. Begins with an 'H'.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Halshep<br />
<br />
David: No. Anyway, when they brought personal computing...I think Barnell<br />
maybe even started it, and then they moved it to New Jersey, and<br />
then David said "I'm not going to New Jersey. I'm a west coast<br />
guy," or whatever. And then, they changed the whole thing totally.<br />
That's why I said they're one of the ones where they were so<br />
totally advertiser driven. A press release is a product review, as<br />
far as they were concerned.<br />
They had some interesting stuff. They were a competitor only in<br />
name, but also because they got the advertising. "I think I'm going<br />
to advertise." "Oh! We're going to publish a wonderful review! Give<br />
it to us." And so they were early, and they made money. There were<br />
a bunch of flash-in-the-pan magazines that lasted 2 or 3 or maybe 6<br />
issues, but nobody...<br />
<br />
Kevin: But only one in seven made it, so...<br />
<br />
Betsy: One in seven, right?<br />
<br />
David: That's right, exactly. I can't remember the name of some of these<br />
ones, but there was a very successful big magazine that published<br />
all Apple...reviews of Apple stuff. What was that one? Apple by<br />
themselves spawned I'd guess half a dozen magazines.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Inquest, and Insider, and Apple...a bunch of others there.<br />
<br />
David: Right. Actually, there's one that I can't think of the name of, it<br />
turned out, it was bigger and thicker and creative. They were<br />
publishing a lot of stuff, but again, it would all be positive and<br />
so they really killed us on getting advertising. We had been a<br />
publisher of Apple material for a while. Then all these others came<br />
along. That one, whatever it was, was really took a lot of<br />
advertising from us. I'll think about it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You'll remember.<br />
<br />
David: I'll remember some of this. When it all settled out, you came back<br />
down to eight or nine, but the ones we're talking about...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Well, at one point there was 200.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I think that's correct.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You are probably counting newsletters..<br />
<br />
Kevin: Probably industry-specific stuff and niche stuff but still, you<br />
went from one to 200, 10 years ago.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. That's true.</div>Mauryhttps://www.computingpioneers.com/index.php?title=Dave_Ahl_and_Betsy_Ahl&diff=148Dave Ahl and Betsy Ahl2019-09-25T22:11:52Z<p>Maury: talked to David, Tarry-on is actually Atarian</p>
<hr />
<div>This is a transcript of an audio interview. This transcript may contain errors - if you're using this material for research, etc. please verify with the original recorded interview.<br />
<br />
Source: ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast<br />
<br />
Source URL: http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-280-david-and-betsy-ahl-creative-computing-magazine<br />
<br />
Interviewer: Kevin Savetz<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm interested in how you guys got together. Was it some sort of<br />
office romance? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It started before then. I was working at Drew University and I was<br />
dating the computer science professor. He invited Dave...he was a<br />
subscriber to Creative Computing. I can remember being at his house<br />
and picking up a copy of this magazine and thinking, "Creative<br />
Computing," and laughing. "What kind of a title is that?"<br />
He invited Dave to come speak to one of his classes. While he was<br />
there, he said, "I should stop by your placement office. We're<br />
starting to expand. I'm looking for some people." Right? Am I<br />
getting this right? I was looking for other opportunities, so I<br />
sent him my resume. Many months later, he hired me.<br />
<br />
David: She still smarts about that.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: I interviewed her in, I don't know, April or so.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You interviewed me on April 17th and you did not hire me until<br />
August 1st. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: A lot was going on that year. That was '78.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was a really long time after that that we got married. We didn't<br />
get married until 10 years later.<br />
<br />
David: Actually, I had hired Betsy as our business manager. That's what I<br />
really needed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Not a wife, then.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not wife then, either.<br />
<br />
David: Not at that point. We had 2 buildings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had one.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, well I was looking for...<br />
<br />
Betsy: My first job was to find another building.<br />
<br />
David: We were expanding like crazy. In fact, one of the reasons that I<br />
didn't hire her sooner, I had just left my day job at AT&T, and was<br />
facing up to, "Oh my gosh, can I afford to take a salary out of<br />
Creative Computing?" Yes, we had expanded a lot, but can I even pay<br />
myself, much less other senior people? I left AT&T in July, and<br />
finally by August it became clear I really have to get this<br />
administration end of things under control.<br />
The editorial was OK. I had enough outside contributors that were<br />
going along with what we were doing in-house that I could continue<br />
with that, but it was the other end of things where we really had<br />
some problems. So then we go to 2 separate facilities. One was a 2<br />
family house on the other side of Morristown, and the other was a<br />
converted greenhouse garage, which is where I started. So, Betsy<br />
was in the greenhouse garage where I had the administration side of<br />
things, and I was at the house and that was the editorial and art<br />
and...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Software.<br />
<br />
David: ...putting the magazine together. Software, right. So she would<br />
come over from her place to my office every day or two just to let<br />
me know what's going on, and we'd get together. But it wasn't until<br />
I don't' remember the date when Betsy was saying, "Well, I'd like<br />
to get into..."<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well I had spent all my summers in college and two thereafter<br />
working at our local newspaper, writing editing and putting the<br />
whole thing together, so I think I more or less just said, "We've<br />
got all these new product announcements that we don't have anybody<br />
to do, why don't I just do them?" So, I started out doing the press<br />
releases and things.<br />
<br />
David: Her newspaper experience was first in high school covering sports.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, I started out covering the unpopular sports as a senior in<br />
high school. Because they didn't want a girl to write about the<br />
important sports. So they let the girl write about the unimportant<br />
sports, which turned out to be the winning sports, at this small<br />
New Jersey high school. That's how I started.<br />
<br />
David: And then at the newspaper, you started by writing obituaries,<br />
right?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well, it's one of the things I did. I always wanted to be a Spanish<br />
teacher. I didn't know anything about this. So, I got this sports-<br />
writing job by way of a babysitting job, I babysat for the<br />
publisher's kids and on the way home one night he said to me, "We<br />
always have a boy from the school who writes about the sports for<br />
the paper, do you know anybody?" and I said, "Well, I know the guy<br />
who did it last year, and if he could do it, I could do it."<br />
So I did that and didn't' think much more of it. Went off to<br />
college, came back over spring break, and ran into the guy in the<br />
grocery store and he said, "Would you like a job working for the<br />
paper this summer?" And I said sure. I had no idea whether he<br />
wanted me to sweep the floors or what, but it was a job so I took<br />
it. It was in the editorial department.<br />
<br />
And I learned from some very serious journalists who had worked for<br />
a very good paper, the Newark Evening News, which was a very<br />
serious paper that probably was too serious and folded, probably in<br />
the mid '60s, but these people were really good journalists and<br />
they taught me a lot.<br />
<br />
I think it was that first year, about halfway through the summer<br />
the publisher was on vacation, the editor was going to go on<br />
vacation when the publisher came back and the publisher, the day he<br />
was supposed to come back had appendicitis, had to have an<br />
appendectomy which back in those days was a much bigger deal than<br />
it is now. The editor said, "Well, I'm leaving." [laughs] And there<br />
I was. I was running this little paper.<br />
<br />
David: So I figured if you can run a newspaper, even though it's just a<br />
summer job, she could do a lot for us. Well, Betsy continued to<br />
handle the administrative things for really quite awhile and, as<br />
she said, probably was initially doing new product releases. Cause<br />
you get just tons of it over the transom and from these smaller<br />
companies...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So you'd like get a press release and then you'd rewrite it, that<br />
sort of things?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well we had a new product section and it was a format, a style for<br />
them, for each one. If they sent a photo, do a photo, a cut line<br />
for it. Basically what I do is let them pile up and then sort<br />
through and figure out which ones were worthy of attention. And<br />
then it was kind of just filler. They ran in one column and when<br />
you came to the end of the magazine whatever you had leftover you<br />
would fill in with these.<br />
<br />
David: And the thing is that the companies that were putting out these<br />
press releases, this was back in the, what '76, '77 or so, tiny<br />
little companies. They had no marketing expertise so they were<br />
sending us, in some cases, not quite handwritten but pretty crude.<br />
So it took some editing and some real work to make them readable.<br />
And then, as Betsy said, you had to guess. OK, which one, this is a<br />
significant product but is this guy going to be able to make this<br />
company go or is it just going to flop? And we tried to be<br />
responsible to the readers. Reporting on things that weren't just a<br />
wonderful great new idea but something that they were going to have<br />
on the market that was going to get some support and everything<br />
else. So anyway. That was a long story of how we got together.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I still don't know how you got together.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We were working in an office about as large as this banquette here<br />
together. Because when we first started working together we didn't<br />
have this other house. So it was the two of us. You had an actual<br />
desk I believe. I had a table that he had made out of particle<br />
board. Yeah it was fancy and I had to put duct tape along it<br />
because the edge was making holes in my clothes.<br />
So we worked in this office back to back, sort of got to know each<br />
other, and became friends, little by little. He said to me, when<br />
you're looking for this building, it would be a good thing if there<br />
was a place for me to live because I'm in the process of getting<br />
separated from my wife. Which it turned out you didn't do right<br />
away but eventually you did. Right?<br />
<br />
David: Well, it was three months later. That was right away in a sense.<br />
What precipitated that was we had a woman that was working in the<br />
mailroom and she got in cahoots with somebody in the accounting<br />
department and they started working a little embezzlement.<br />
<br />
Kevin: This was at the [inaudible 00:13:49] ?<br />
<br />
David: Pardon?<br />
<br />
Betsy: At Creative Computing.<br />
<br />
David: No, at Creative Computing. This was just after Betsy was hired. In<br />
fact, they had it going on before and I mean they were very good at<br />
it. What they did is they set up a bank account in the name of<br />
Creative Computing in the next county. And they would take very<br />
fourth or fifth check and it might be a subscription, it might be<br />
paying for an ad or something...<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was mostly the advertisers.<br />
<br />
David: Well it was both. And then they put that into their bank account.<br />
And then the one that was in the accounting department would mark<br />
the thing as paid.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, she didn't. That was her mistake.<br />
<br />
David: Well, she didn't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because that wasn't her job.<br />
<br />
David: Well she blew one. In any event it was my advertising manager that<br />
we had sent an overdue notice to one of the advertisers.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Apple.<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Apple. It was Regis McKenna, it was Apple's agency.<br />
<br />
David: And they said, we paid that. And a woman said, well send me proof.<br />
And they did. And we looked at the bank where it was deposited and<br />
then we called in local detective, police department. And they got<br />
the bank records and said, "How much do you think this was?" Well<br />
no they didn't say that, they said, this is probably a lot more<br />
than you thought.<br />
And it turned out to be well over $100,000. And our total annual,<br />
not even profit at that point...well, the gross was just about a<br />
million at that point, not quite, but close to it. So $100,000 was<br />
a big, big chunk 10 percent.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When was this?<br />
<br />
David: '78. And, so, obviously we fired these two. And then the court<br />
finally, they determined that they had also, one of them had been<br />
involved in welfare fraud and other stuff and the court ordered<br />
them to pay it back at the rate of, I don't know...<br />
<br />
Betsy: 47 cents a week.<br />
<br />
David: It was some tiny amount.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 00:16:26]<br />
[laughter and crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Course they'll never pay anything.<br />
<br />
David: And we got one payment you know, and that was it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And she was ordered to do public service. Like who wants someone<br />
doing public service for them who's done something like that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Magazines back then, probably any business but, they were a hotbed<br />
of intrigue. You had that happened and then the whole Bike Magazine<br />
getting stolen.<br />
<br />
David: So Betsy actually, in response to that brought, in response to the<br />
embezzlement brought in her Sister-in-Law Bobbi, and I think your<br />
mother too...<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Bobbi's mother.<br />
<br />
David: Bobbi's mother, OK. But one to...<br />
<br />
Betsy: My mother in law. I was a widow at the time.<br />
<br />
David: ...do some of the accounting because we didn't have an accountant<br />
and wanted just to help out and make some calls to advertisers and<br />
say can you speed up your payment a little bit and also calls to<br />
people that we owed money to, hey we're going to be maybe a little<br />
late. It really didn't look good. That was just a huge amount of<br />
money and so we had to stretch things out and hope that the growth<br />
continued so we could recover some of this.<br />
Betsy really rescued us there. It was amazing. We finally did<br />
stretch things out. What precipitated the separation with my wife<br />
at the time is I went home and told her this had happened and<br />
everything.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Thanksgiving weekend. Day before Thanksgiving.<br />
<br />
David: The day before Thanksgiving is when we got all the information from<br />
the police department and I went home to my wife and she said, "You<br />
dumb...," well I won't repeat the whole thing but, "You are so<br />
stupid. You trust people." "Yes, I trust people." "You shouldn't<br />
trust people like that. Get out of the house. I can't put up with<br />
this anymore." So it was a good thing we had a two family house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had this two family house.<br />
<br />
David: I moved into the bedroom on one side.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He had his office on one side of the top floor in the back bedroom<br />
and his bedroom in the back bedroom on the other side and his<br />
kitchen. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is this the place I was reading about where your bedroom was above<br />
the kitchen?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yes. The Ted Nelson.<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, a lot of things precipitated. Because of that, we had to<br />
make some other changes on personnel and move some people around. I<br />
think after that then Betsy took more of a role in the editorial<br />
end of things.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Stayed there until the bitter end.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The bitter end. Actually, I was there after he was gone.<br />
<br />
David: That's true.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ziff continued to pay me several months after they closed the<br />
magazine to stay behind and clean up because we have a 75,000<br />
square foot building. Make sure that we don't dispose of the<br />
hardware and just basically get it ready.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When you quit at the phone company to start a magazine, that must<br />
have been scary.<br />
<br />
David: I had left Digital Equipment in 1974, and I'm sure you read the<br />
whole rationale behind that, and joined AT&T in marketing,<br />
educational marketing. Same thing I was doing at DEC but obviously<br />
marketing different products to a different mix of customers. AT&T,<br />
back then and perhaps today, they had a real formula that you're in<br />
a job for two years and then they rotate you out or they put you in<br />
another job.<br />
The way AT&T works is they have certain steps. There's a manager<br />
and then a director level. There are levels, one, two, three, four,<br />
five. The operating companies, like Pacific Bell and so on, have<br />
similar steps that are considered a half step below AT&T. What they<br />
do is they rotate you out to an operating company, a half step<br />
promotion, they rotate you back into AT&T, now you're a full step.<br />
You never get a full step in one company.<br />
<br />
They had offered me a rotation to Southern Bell. Birmingham,<br />
Alabama. "No. No." Then probably two or three months later said<br />
we've got an opening in Wisconsin Tel. "Oh my gosh. Come on,<br />
something sensible." I turned them down, which was bad. You can't<br />
turn down. If you turn down three you might as well retire.<br />
<br />
The third one was, in a sense, it wasn't a promotion but it was a<br />
sideways job jump within AT&T itself. I went from having the<br />
education group, which was about eight people, to corporate<br />
communications, which is about 100 people and a huge budget. I was<br />
responsible for all of the marketing communications for the whole<br />
Bell system. Not advertising.<br />
<br />
We had seminar centers, put out all kinds of educational pamphlets,<br />
even a magazine for our customers on how to use the equipment. I<br />
was doing that. It's a big job. It's a 50 hour a week job. Creative<br />
Computing was halfway down the block. I'd go there at lunch time,<br />
see how things were doing.<br />
<br />
As I said a little bit ago, when it looked like we were going to<br />
hit a million dollars I said I've got to get serious about this.<br />
That's when I resigned from AT&T. That was probably the first, I<br />
shouldn't say the first, but that was a major problem with my wife<br />
at that time. You're leaving AT&T? You're leaving all those<br />
benefits? What are you doing, you idiot? We were on the downward<br />
spiral at that point and then the embezzlement just sealed the<br />
whole thing.<br />
<br />
Leaving any job for an unknown thing like you started a little<br />
company and you leave your day job. You're making a real<br />
commitment.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Even once you were at Creative full time, it looks like you did a<br />
lot of everything. You were writing, you were doing programming,<br />
you were being the editor, the publisher and the editor which is<br />
not done anymore.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. I don't know. You can correct me. I don't think I was a<br />
control freak.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. You had Phil Ellenberg. You had just hired Phil Ellenberg as<br />
the advertising manager. Richie was doing it. Where did he come<br />
from? He came from some respectable place. He came from some<br />
respectable place, Phil Ellenberg.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, he did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was like a real person who had a real job, not like the rest of<br />
us. He was the ad manager. I think once you made the step to leave<br />
AT&T then you mostly concentrated on the editorial. You weren't<br />
selling ads and writing and you had Steve North who was doing a lot<br />
of the editorial.<br />
<br />
David: At the beginning, yeah. The thing is I'd be lying if I said I knew<br />
how things were going to go, I knew this was going to be a huge<br />
magazine some day. I had no clue. When I started Creative Computing<br />
there weren't even personal computers at that point. I was<br />
convinced, I guess, that they would come about. I had no idea that<br />
it would be three months later that the Altair came about. It was<br />
more that I thought that an educational magazine like we had been<br />
publishing at DEC should continue.<br />
DEC had dropped off. They stopped publishing Edu when I left the<br />
education group. Well, they published an issue or two but they<br />
really weren't serious about continuing it. Then you had all of<br />
these people out here in the west coast, the Hewlett Packard<br />
computers. They were publishing some good software, they had some<br />
good arrangements with Minnesota Educational Computers Consortium<br />
and some others to distribute stuff that they developed, but there<br />
was no information source for schools and teachers and kids that<br />
were using computers.<br />
<br />
That's what I envisioned initially, but then once the Altair and<br />
the others came out people buy this kit computer and say what can I<br />
do with it? We've got these programs that will run.<br />
<br />
Betsy: First you have to steal Basic.<br />
<br />
David: What?<br />
<br />
Betsy: First you have to steal Basic.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I noticed that, I don't know what it's called, the public opinion<br />
or I don't know the word, this part here. The number one magazine<br />
of computer applications.<br />
<br />
David: That was a Davis thing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It started off first issue a non-profit magazine of educational and<br />
recreational. That was November 1970. May/June 1975 the words non-<br />
profit disappeared.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He never set it up as a non-profit.<br />
<br />
David: I did not.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You started making a profit.<br />
<br />
David: That's right. [laughs]<br />
Betsy; It was the unintentionally non-profit.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Three years later it quietly changed into the number one magazine<br />
of computer applications and software.<br />
<br />
David: That was when Ziff Davis took over.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Really? No, that was '78.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, that was '78.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, '78.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He stayed until the end.<br />
<br />
David: Right. OK. You're right. Who knows. We changed it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It seemed like a good idea at the time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's clearly a shift from education to education plus other things.<br />
<br />
David: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think it was when he realized that if you really wanted to make a<br />
profit you had to leave education behind because teachers want<br />
everything for free, or they certainly did then.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They have some websites for teachers. They still do. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Schools, teachers, yeah, they want everything for free and they get<br />
a lot for free. Places like Huntington Computer Project. There was<br />
one out here, Oregon. Yes, there was. I think it was based right<br />
here in Portland. It would have been, right, if it was in Oregon?<br />
Yes, there was a computing consortium at that time, Hewlett Packard<br />
oriented.<br />
Then you had People's Computer Company down in California that was<br />
sort of providing stuff to schools. They were mostly into<br />
alternative schools and there were a lot of them in the Bay area at<br />
that time. In fact, there was a magazine or a newspaper, big thing,<br />
I don't know how often it came out, called the "De-school Primer".<br />
<br />
It was for people that...I won't say they were hippies but<br />
basically homeschoolers but they got together and said, "We're<br />
going to educate our kids outside of the public education system<br />
but we don't want to do it individually. We'll get together." There<br />
was a big movement there and they were into computers, unlike the<br />
public schools back in '75, '76.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Homeschooling back then was very avant-garde. It was not approved.<br />
<br />
David: Not like today. The shift away from education. That, of course, was<br />
partially driven by the hardware that was then available to people<br />
at home.<br />
When I first started the magazine, I had four editors over the<br />
years, five I guess, but Steve Gray had been publishing a<br />
newsletter, what he called the "Amateur Computer Group Newsletter".<br />
It was for engineers who were scavenging up old parts from<br />
Honeywell and IBM and GE and DEC and trying to put together a<br />
computer. You've got success stories and here's how you can make<br />
this worth together.<br />
<br />
That was a long way away from an Altair, but that's what I was<br />
focusing on, people that were doing that and education. Changed our<br />
focus. You're right. Good observation.<br />
<br />
Kevin: After that, do you feel the focus changed in the next 10 years?<br />
<br />
David: The focus changed largely due to selling the magazine to Ziff<br />
Davis.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When's that?<br />
<br />
David: We were negotiating for a while and I think the sale finally went<br />
through in '83. Yeah, '83. Maybe late '82 but roughly then. They<br />
felt that you need more of a business focus, small business and<br />
people running businesses out of their home. That's where it<br />
started but then we got into real small businesses. I shouldn't say<br />
real but a store front or a small manufacturer, something like<br />
that. That's probably a direction we would not have gone. I<br />
wouldn't have gone on my own.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had a magazine called "Small Business Computing." Remember?<br />
<br />
David: That's right, we did. I would have kept Creative more targeted on<br />
the home market and still education, to some extent, but more on<br />
the home and people that were running a business, a single<br />
entrepreneur. You could review a spreadsheet or a small business<br />
computer or higher end printer or something but not lift it up to<br />
that next level up.<br />
When you're owned by somebody else and they say this is what we<br />
want to do you've got to be responsive to it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Why did you sell? Was it something that had to be done? I've read<br />
the official line.<br />
<br />
David: I think the official line is pretty close to the real line. What<br />
happened is the first magazine, maybe not the very first but the<br />
first sizable magazine, to sell was the Byte and they sold to<br />
McGraw Hill. Then there were three or four other sales. At the time<br />
there were maybe eight special interest publishers in the country.<br />
You had Hurst and CBS magazine and Ziff Davis. Maybe eight serious<br />
ones. There were some others that were, "Oh, it'd be nice if we<br />
could get into it."<br />
What happened is all of us at that point were spending maybe<br />
$100,000, $150,000 on circulation promotion. McGraw Hill says we<br />
want to get out there, we're going to spend a million dollars.<br />
They're mailing 10 times as much as we are. They're going to trade<br />
shows with big, elaborate booths and handing out all kinds of...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Free magazines.<br />
<br />
David: Not only free magazines but other stuff. That was half of it. The<br />
other half, which was probably more than half, was the advertising<br />
sales. We were using reps. We had different reps in different parts<br />
of the country, paying the rep commission on the advertising. When<br />
you are a McGraw Hill or a Hurst or a Ziff Davis you've got an in-<br />
house staff. They would have a reception at one of the computer<br />
conferences, a big deal.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We used to have a hospitality suite at the hotels in some of these<br />
conferences and then we would bring little hunks of cheese that we<br />
cut up from home and sneak the bottles of wine up the back stairway<br />
and they were having these big things with the giant balls of<br />
shrimp.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. It was just an order of magnitude different than what we<br />
could do. What happened, really, was that it got to the point where<br />
there were only three, really two, serious bidders that were still<br />
looking for a magazine and there are still about four magazines,<br />
four decent quality magazines, on the market and one was Compute,<br />
one was Interface Age. Personal Computing had just sold, there was<br />
us, and I forget who the fourth one was. There was four.<br />
<br />
Kevin: There were more magazines than buyers at this point.<br />
<br />
David: That's right. There were a lot more magazines, too, but there were<br />
four major players. One of the buyers, I didn't really regard them<br />
as serious, and that was Atari. I think they wanted to back into<br />
the thing. The two buyers left were CBS, and they had a magazine<br />
division at that time, and Ziff Davis and that was it. I said,<br />
"Man, I've got to make a deal here." That's what happened.<br />
I look back with hindsight. I said the guy, Robert I forget his<br />
last name, that owned Compute magazine, he held out. He held out<br />
until the end and he said, "I'm better than Interface Age," and he<br />
was and whatever the other one was, Family Computing, "I'm better<br />
than them." He got a really nice payoff from CBS because it was the<br />
last one and they wanted him. I don't know. If I had held off a<br />
little more would I have gotten more? Probably.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How much did you get?<br />
<br />
David: Can we publish this figure?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't know. I don't think we ever have.<br />
<br />
David: No, we never have.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's my chance for a scoop.<br />
<br />
David: Pardon?<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's my chance for a scoop.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] I'd rather not say. I can tell you Compute, if you ever<br />
read that number, which you will, it was seven times that much. It<br />
was huge. Huge. At that point, I think CBS just said we've got to<br />
get into this. We've really got to do something. The big loser was<br />
Bob Jones at Interface Age. He had a good magazine. That was a<br />
good, solid magazine. Bob Jones, he went to shows, he was always in<br />
a suit and tie. He would have fit into the corporate environment<br />
very well but he held out too long. I think he was holding out for<br />
even more.<br />
That's what I was afraid of. Less than a year later he was out of<br />
business. There was no way you could compete with these big guys.<br />
Ziff instantly started having these receptions at PC expos.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They had ad reps all over the country.<br />
<br />
David: Ad reps, yeah. Oh my gosh. We would not have survived.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Again, you [inaudible 00:41:03] .<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Not exactly right but yes. Wasn't bad. Wasn't bad.<br />
<br />
Kevin: But Ziff didn't have it for very long before they let it go. It was<br />
only a couple of years.<br />
<br />
David: It was almost four years. Three and a half years. They did a study,<br />
and this is one of the classics. I've been making a presentation at<br />
Leslie Park last year on the 10 biggest blunders in personal<br />
computing, and actually it's up to 12 now. One was, and I still<br />
feel that it was huge, is that Ziff Davis analyzed that market in<br />
'85 and determined that the home market, the market for home<br />
computers, had reached saturation. Five percent of the homes have a<br />
computer. That's it.<br />
There were three things, three major conclusions from their survey.<br />
I think probably one and a half of them were pretty good and one<br />
and a half were just absolutely wrong. The home market reaching<br />
saturation, wrong. The second one was that they said that the<br />
magazines that would be successful would be those that were focused<br />
on specific brands of computers. Are you getting all that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: With the IBM PC it really brought standardization to the industry.<br />
Their analysis was that Apple and PC were going to be the dominant<br />
players in the future and in that they were right. They said we've<br />
got to have a magazine that's just focused on those two and they<br />
did. What was their Apple magazine? They had two Apple magazines.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A+.<br />
<br />
David: But they also had the one for the Mac.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mac User.<br />
<br />
David: They had two Apple magazines and then PC. PC they spun off a whole<br />
bunch. PC Week.<br />
<br />
Betsy: PC Junior.<br />
<br />
David: A bunch of them. In any event, they were right in that. The other<br />
one that they were semi-right, in the long term future they were<br />
totally wrong but in the short term future they were probably<br />
right, and that they looked at...We had been covering bulletin<br />
board systems. CompuServe, whatever its predecessor was, basically<br />
online type of stuff.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Genie.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. They said that's just a flash in a pan, online stuff. Well, in<br />
'85 it was. It took a while. It took another 8 to 10 years for that<br />
but then oh my God. You know what's happened today. If they had<br />
stuck with Creative Computing and rather than trying to make it a<br />
small business focused magazine but kept the home and the online<br />
focus we would have owned the Internet market today, absolutely<br />
owned it. It would have been a bigger magazine than all the others<br />
put together. Hindsight is 20/20.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I know it wasn't your choice but do you have regret about that?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: At the time it was devastating.<br />
<br />
David: Absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was like someone killing your child.<br />
<br />
David: At the time, we sat in these meetings up in Stanford, Connecticut,<br />
of all places. The reason for that is Bill Ziff. What happened in<br />
the interim a year or two after they purchased Creative Computing<br />
and PC, Bill Ziff came down with cancer really big time and was<br />
afraid of dying next year. So he was moving all of his resources<br />
and the holdings outside of New York to avoid really major<br />
taxation. I'm not sure that Connecticut was much better but he was<br />
splitting them between Connecticut and Florida. Anyway, we wound up<br />
having a bunch of meetings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was trying to maintain residence in Connecticut.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I guess that was it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was living in the Crown Plaza.<br />
<br />
David: I remember the last one. We were up at the hotel.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Crown Plaza. It was Stanford, it wasn't Harvard.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, Stanford.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I said Harvard.<br />
<br />
David: When they finally came and said we're going to shut this down. That<br />
was a devastating time. We probably could have continued to work<br />
for Ziff if we had been willing to go into New York but when you<br />
get used to working a mile or two from where you live the idea of<br />
commuting into New York, who knows what the job would have been.<br />
Bye. That was it. That was, in retrospect, a mistake.<br />
The other thing that happened as a result of Bill Ziff having this<br />
bout with cancer is that Ziff Davis sold off all of their other<br />
special interest magazines. Popular Boating, Popular Photography.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yachting, Modern Bride.<br />
<br />
David: They had a big group of travel magazines. Actually, one of the<br />
things they did after Creative Computing was to shut down...we got<br />
friendly with the publisher and some of the people in the traveling<br />
division and we started doing some freelance travel writing.<br />
I was writing a monthly column for one of the travel magazines that<br />
went to travel agents on automating your travel office and so on,<br />
which was an interesting thing because there's a small business<br />
that really depended upon computers with the reservation systems<br />
and all the airlines had a different reservation system. You had to<br />
have Saber.<br />
<br />
A lot of them would go with one and make an agreement with somebody<br />
else to make their other reservations. In any event, it was a bad<br />
system and I was writing a column on how to make this work for you.<br />
As you know, I don't know how many months later we got into the<br />
Atari camp.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was your next gig?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. It was Joe Sugarman, remember, that hooked us up with Atari.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I thought it was Neil Harris.<br />
<br />
David: He was the one we worked with but it was Sugarman.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because he came from Commodore. I didn't know it was Joe Sugarman.<br />
<br />
David: He ran a company called JS&A for Joe Sugarman and Associates. They<br />
were the first one that took these full page ads in lots of<br />
different magazines and the quarter page...<br />
<br />
Betsy: The first advertorials.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, advertorial. The first print advertorials. Really serious<br />
stuff. Out of that, he spawned at least a dozen other companies.<br />
Sharper Image is a Sugarman and it's a spinoff. They've got a whole<br />
page just focused on this air ionizer or some crazy product, but he<br />
sold tons of that stuff. Then he started offering courses. He was<br />
on the verge of doing some big deal with Atari and so he knew all<br />
the people out there.<br />
I had taken his course and started running the ad. In fact, there's<br />
probably one in one of those issues that is basically a Sugarman<br />
ad. And so anyway, you took the course, too. So we got to know him.<br />
He got to know us, and we kept up. And, oh, OK. Creative Computing<br />
has folded, and I'm trying to get something going with Atari and<br />
getting their magazine really serious. And so he was the one that<br />
hooked us up with them. By the way, I'm surprised that you don't<br />
have Atari Explorer on your website<br />
<br />
Kevin: On the website? Well, the deal with my Atari magazines website is<br />
I've always strove to get permission. Atari can't be owned by the<br />
same company for more than three months at time.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's hard to get permission that way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You can't get permission. But it's out there, elsewhere. There are<br />
other archivists who don't bother to get permission. That's another<br />
good way to do things. Yeah, it's out there. I think Archive.org<br />
has it.<br />
<br />
David: Really? Yeah, because I hadn't seen it. I was looking for<br />
something...I still get inquires every once in a while from<br />
somebody that wants something in one of the previous magazines that<br />
we've published.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That's why I don't' risk it. There's a few magazine that I just<br />
absolutely would not, because it's owned by some giant monolith<br />
corporation now, and they need to hold on everything even if it's<br />
30 years old.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because someday they might be able to make money from it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right. That's why that's not there.<br />
Talk to me about...You did some weird stuff. The weird stuff I'm<br />
thinking of is the board game.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: "Computer Rage."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We just saw that. We might not have even remembered what it was it,<br />
but we saw it last night at the museum.<br />
<br />
David: They have one in the Collection's area of the Computer Museum. They<br />
didn't even know that we published it. I thought, "Look at this."<br />
<br />
Kevin: You did Computer Rage, which was weird; I want to ask you about<br />
that. You did the record album.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The record album made way more sense than the game.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, well it was a guy named Allan. He was a colonel at that time<br />
and he came to see me with the idea for the computer game.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I forgot about that.<br />
<br />
David: He was a colonel in the Army and had something to do with<br />
educational programs. The Army said people should know more about<br />
how computers work and everything else. He said, "The games that<br />
are on the market are pretty tacky and not fun. I've devised<br />
something." We worked together with him. We finally decided, "All<br />
right. We'll publish this game. By the way, he's a general and<br />
finally retired.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But he's not financing his retirement with [inaudible 00:54:29] .<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: No, not at all.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Will anyone buy this?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We did overprint.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't a big seller or big success, but we sold enough of them.<br />
Now the record was a little different. There was a guy named Dick<br />
Moberg who, at the time, was the president of the Philadelphia Area<br />
Computer Society. The first two personal computer festivals were<br />
actually in New Jersey, not the west coast. The West Coast Computer<br />
Faire came later with Jim Warren and that group. John Dilks started<br />
this computer festival in Atlantic City. This was before Atlantic<br />
City was a big casino place, but...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well, it was a casino place, but...<br />
<br />
David: ...but it was pretty tacky.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It still is.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Not like now.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not like now where it's so classy.<br />
<br />
David: In any event, they were having some issues with the hotel and the<br />
convention center in Atlantic City. Dick Moberg said, "We people in<br />
Philadelphia can do a better job than you guys in New Jersey." And<br />
he got together with what was his name? Lenny? And<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh! Saul Levis.<br />
<br />
David: Saul Levis, who was the president of the New Jersey amateur<br />
computer group. The two of them got together and said yeah, it'll<br />
be more convenient if we do a thing in Philadelphia. And Saul<br />
Levis, he had put together the first Trenton computer festival. It<br />
wasn't a big huge thing; it's gotten to be gigantic. In any event<br />
they said OK, we'll do this. At that point, this was '78; the Apple<br />
had just come out and people were making little plug-in<br />
peripherals.<br />
There was a company that...I'm not going to be able to remember who<br />
it was. They made a nice little plug-in board for the Apple. What<br />
they had was a very nice thing on the screen where you could<br />
position notes and then have them played back. So it was a visual<br />
programming of music.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Music Construction Center?<br />
<br />
Betsy: There were ads for it in magazines.<br />
<br />
David: No, it was a guy out of Denver. I don't remember. Anyway, before<br />
that everything had appeared line by line. But there were some<br />
reasonable playback systems that were starting to come on the<br />
market for the S-100 bus. There were about four of them. The<br />
programming was a little bit harrier, but nonetheless they sounded<br />
OK. And then there was still the leftovers in a sense that people<br />
that were doing work on mainframes to process music.<br />
So Dick Moberg said, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could get a number<br />
of these together?" And of course there's the Philadelphia<br />
Orchestra, we'll make it a Philadelphia Computer Music Festival! So<br />
it was largely his idea, but then, how do you publicize it? Well,<br />
you've got this magazine that's in your backyard, that was willing<br />
to recruit some people and publicize it. So we got about...I don't<br />
know at the festival there were probably 25 or 30 people that had<br />
stuff.<br />
<br />
They recorded it all, which in retrospect was a bit of a mistake<br />
because they had problems with one of the two channels in the<br />
stereo. They had the big reel-to-reel tape recorder, one of the<br />
channels was seriously too low. And then they said, "Well, we've<br />
got this wonderful tape; what are we going to do with it?" And I<br />
said, "Well, I'll do something with it."<br />
<br />
I hooked up with a studio in the city that made records, and we<br />
went in there and corrected the low channel a little bit, not<br />
totally, but enough that it sounded like stereo. And put together a<br />
vinyl record!<br />
<br />
I edited out a lot of the poor quality performances, made the<br />
record, and that sold! It sold pretty well. Our biggest problem was<br />
shipping. How do you ship a 12-inch vinyl record without it<br />
breaking? But that sold pretty well. That, of course, died off<br />
along with everything else when Creative Computing got killed by<br />
Ziff. But, I still had the original test pressing of that, the<br />
original, original.<br />
<br />
I played it back, and it sounded very good. Put it into, I forget<br />
what the software was, but, it was one, the digital routine. It<br />
would have been nice if I still had the original tape, but, I<br />
didn't. But, OK, it's got a little bit of deterioration, going to a<br />
record.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, we're not talking about losing overtones of a<br />
violin up at 15,000 hertz. It was within a narrow band, to begin<br />
with, in any event. But that did let me totally correct the left<br />
channel and bring it up to what it should be. I put that out. I'm<br />
selling CDs now, of that.<br />
<br />
In fact, a guy from Australia ordered one, and obviously, the<br />
postage to send anything overseas is a lot more. He said, "Why<br />
don't you just make MP3 files out of it?" Because, they're WAV<br />
files, the way they are now. I go, "OK."<br />
<br />
This is very recent, like within the last couple of weeks, I<br />
downloaded some software, "Convert WAV to MP3," converted it, sent<br />
them the files. They said, "That's great." What I think what I'll<br />
probably do is try to figure out how I can make them available from<br />
a website.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You've apparently forgotten that, like, 10 years ago, I did that.<br />
They're there.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. I know.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They're at vintagecomputermusic.com.<br />
<br />
David: Are they MP3s?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Well, then, I don't have to do it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You dummy.<br />
<br />
David: Bam. I did remember. I didn't know that you did them all. I thought<br />
you did a sample.<br />
<br />
Kevin: No. They're all there. I can see you're getting reflux.<br />
<br />
David: Boom. I wasted a little time. I waste a lot of time, these days.<br />
That was a cool thing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just think it was neat that you guys were willing to take chances<br />
with weird stuff.<br />
<br />
David: Where we took chances with really weird stuff was in the software.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Software publishing?<br />
<br />
David: We had a brand called, Sensational Software. Unfortunately, Ziff<br />
decided it was competing with some potential advertisers, which it<br />
was, in a sense. They killed it off. But, we had some really good<br />
stuff. We had the Apple game, what the heck was it? It was ported<br />
directly over from the arcade games.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Was it, "Space Invaders"?<br />
<br />
David: "Space Invaders."<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was a clone of, "Space Invaders"?<br />
<br />
David: It was the real.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You got it from, Jeff Lee's guy.<br />
<br />
David: Because, "Space Invaders," the Japanese game, was one of the first<br />
full-sized console video games where they used a general-purpose<br />
chip. "Space Invaders," was programmed for the 6502, Apple.<br />
We bought it from this Japanese company, and we had the only real<br />
"Space Invaders" game. That was one, and a couple of others that we<br />
really could have gone places with. That was just about the time<br />
that Ziff came in and said, "Nah, you can't have this anymore."<br />
<br />
They were into printed media, so, they kept the books going, but,<br />
not any of the other stuff. The other thing we had, was, speaking<br />
of computer music, a little division, that probably could have<br />
gotten a lot bigger, called Peripherals Plus. We were marketing a<br />
little computer music board, it was an S-100 bus once. But if we<br />
had then...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Didn't we have a plotter, too?<br />
<br />
David: Yep. We had about five or six interesting, low-level products. But,<br />
again, Ziff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That stuff was really competing with the advertisers.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Obviously, that wasn't our intent. But, yes it was. We also<br />
offered courses at that time. Do you remember, at County College?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't.<br />
<br />
David: That was just at when we moved into the new building at Hanover. We<br />
had two people that were doing that.<br />
<br />
Betsy: One of them was that crazy, Larry guy. He was seriously weird.<br />
<br />
David: County College of Morris, we reached an agreement that we would<br />
teach their Introductory Computer course. Not for their day<br />
students, but they offered evening courses, adult education, we<br />
were doing that. Fingers in a lot of pies, at that point.<br />
Actually, from that standpoint, it was, probably, good that Ziff<br />
got us a little bit more focused, and back to the roots of<br />
publishing. Getting spread a little thin.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You went to Atari, got the Atari game, and you did the "Atari<br />
Explorer," right?<br />
<br />
David: "Atari Explorer." They had had an occasional publication, not<br />
really a magazine, but one that was focused on the games, and they<br />
decided that they could start that one up again. It started up with<br />
a new name. We called it, "Atarian." It was focused, basically, on<br />
video games. You buy one of their video games and you get an issue.<br />
Anyway, there were different ways that they were going to promote<br />
it.<br />
But, a year later Nintendo just, absolutely, buried "Atarian," in<br />
'89. They kept Atari Spore going for, I think, two more issues,<br />
right?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Was it two?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember the details.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't much.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I remember why they killed it.<br />
<br />
David: Ms. Feisty here. Come on. You've got to tell the story here.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They were playing games with our printer. Production schedule.<br />
Everybody had a production schedule. We never missed our production<br />
date, getting things to the printer, getting them mailed. We just<br />
did it because that's what you had to do. I will probably get sued<br />
for this. Atari started not paying the printer and the printer says<br />
we're not going to print this until we get paid. The date kept<br />
slipping and slipping and the subscribers would be calling up and<br />
saying, "Where's my magazine?"<br />
This went on. It was bi-monthly. It went on for maybe six months. I<br />
finally wrote an editorial in which I explained to the readers<br />
exactly what was going on. They didn't see it until it was printed.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
David: That didn't get into the magazine, though.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It did.<br />
<br />
David: That's right, it did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They never saw it. We were producing it out of [inaudible 01:10:07]<br />
New Jersey and printing it in eastern Pennsylvania and they never<br />
saw it until it was too late. My tenure was cut short but I didn't<br />
really care at that point. I was sick of them. It was really hard.<br />
They're not easy people to deal with, even when the owners last for<br />
more than three months. That was my suicide by editorial. The only<br />
time in my life I've ever been fired.<br />
<br />
David: I didn't realize they didn't read that beforehand but I should<br />
have. I should have.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] I probably wouldn't have gotten fired if they had.<br />
<br />
David: That was the straw that broke the camera's back.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But then John [inaudible 01:11:05] kept doing it a little bit.<br />
<br />
David: I know. In a lot of cases, particularly with the games magazine,<br />
they wanted to approve everything that went in it. If you do an<br />
objective product review, you call it like it is. Oh m gosh, there<br />
was one, it wasn't just one product but a roundup after Consumer<br />
Electronics' show, and I don't remember what it was. Atari had<br />
brought out some new products that really weren't ready to go.<br />
In some cases I just said, "I'm not going to say anything about<br />
this one or these two or three. I'll focus on the ones that are<br />
ready to go or are in good shape." Oh my gosh. "What about this?<br />
This is a wonderful thing." "Well, maybe it will be but it isn't<br />
yet." We had issues all along on censorship and them changing what<br />
we had written and everything. As Betsy said, they were not nice<br />
people to work with. I forget, the two brothers.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Trammell.<br />
<br />
David: Trammell, yeah. That came from Commodore.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Jack and somebody else. Jack and his brother.<br />
<br />
David: It was interesting because yesterday I saw Nolan Bushnell. He was<br />
at that event. Nolan was flamboyant, but basically he had integrity<br />
and he was an honest guy. Man, oh man. Didn't stay and the<br />
corporation changed after he left.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Then you're done with Atari and then it's straight to military<br />
vehicles there?<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] No.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was a hiatus.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, man. We published magazines, in-house magazines, for a couple<br />
other organizations. Did one for Nabisco called...I don't even<br />
remember but it was for their marketing department. Published that<br />
for some period of time and then they decided to bring it in-house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was more like a newsletter.<br />
<br />
David: It was 16 pages. It was getting there.<br />
<br />
Betsy: 16 pages is a newsletter.<br />
<br />
David: All right. Magazine format. Let's put it that way. We did some<br />
fulfillment. Basically, a lot of freelance writing on the travel<br />
field.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Stuffed dogs. The stuffed dogs. Remember those four dogs for my<br />
brother?<br />
<br />
David: That's fulfillment. Fulfillment for Con Edison. I published a<br />
couple newsletters for a while, one called "Effective Investing"<br />
and one called "Effective Communication" for writers. We're talking<br />
early '90s.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was when people still cared, thought that there might be a<br />
correct way to do something and they wanted to know what it was.<br />
<br />
David: That was focused on "Take this computer and start to use it as a<br />
tool. Don't be afraid of the thing." '91/'92 not everybody was<br />
using a computer yet or a personal computer. That was the<br />
orientation of that. Then the other thing we got into big time was<br />
we'd been involved with a local rescue mission for men with drug,<br />
alcohol, homeless issues and we were writing and producing their<br />
newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We were producing all of their fundraising material.<br />
<br />
David: We started, I think, with the newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, we did everything. Appeal letters and newsletters and<br />
maintaining their database, the donor database. It took a lot of<br />
time.<br />
<br />
David: We did that for five years. Then '96 I got an opportunity to buy<br />
this crazy military vehicles magazine for people that were<br />
restoring old historic military vehicles. It was a magazine but it<br />
was I guess more of a glorified newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was horrible.<br />
<br />
David: It was horrible but it was really terrible. In fact, the editor or<br />
the publisher, whatever, the owner, he'd take the articles however<br />
the writer would send them. If it was double spaced type, boom,<br />
that's what would appear in the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Save all the typesetting.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He had zero typesetting expense.<br />
<br />
David: Zero editing. He just took anything that came in, put it in. Ads<br />
the same way. Half the ads were hand written. Well, not half, but a<br />
significant number had corrections on them by hand. Oh my gosh. It<br />
was so terrible. I made it into a real magazine and built it up. At<br />
that point the circulation had been about 10,000. We built it up<br />
and we were pushing close to 20,000 magazines. It was a real<br />
magazine. I sold it to Crowsey publications.<br />
Then they, which I did not realize at the time, the owner, Chet<br />
Crowsey, had put the whole company up for sale and he sold the<br />
company a year or two later to some other specialty magazine<br />
publisher. We're talking narrow, narrow niche. They published a lot<br />
of, what'd they call it, white tail bow hunting. Really, really<br />
narrow stuff. Up in northern Wisconsin is where they were based. In<br />
any event, he sold it.<br />
<br />
The new publishers, their whole stick was making money. They<br />
immediately raised the subscription price of military vehicles. We<br />
were charging $18 a year which was fine and they raised it to<br />
$21.95 or something and they raised the advertising rates and<br />
everything else.<br />
<br />
The last I knew, the circulation was back down around 10,000.<br />
[laughs] It doesn't pay off to take that approach. I didn't have<br />
the same emotional connection, with that as I did with Creative<br />
Computing and the other magazines there. Fine, you do what you want<br />
with the magazine, it's OK.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You didn't care too much?<br />
<br />
David: Nah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What do you guys do now? It seems like charity work and [inaudible<br />
01:19:45] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. I run a non-profit called Beyond the Walls and he runs his<br />
website and does Bible studies.<br />
<br />
David: Right. Actually, Betsy, the organization she has, she's executive<br />
director of Beyond the Wall, that's gotten huge.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's getting bigger and bigger.<br />
<br />
David: It's gotten huge.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think huge is probably an exaggeration.<br />
<br />
David: Well, not huge like a Gates Foundation thing.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I wish. We started in 2005 with 26 volunteers going to Guatemala to<br />
work with this organization that works with the people who scavenge<br />
in the Guatemala City garbage dump. The dump is in a ravine. It<br />
started in the early '50s and as it has filled up around the edges<br />
they put a couple layers of sand on it and let it sit for a bit and<br />
then the people build houses on it out of scraps and things that<br />
they made.<br />
This organization called Potter's House that we work with has been<br />
working with them for 26 years. They have an education program,<br />
micro-enterprise and health and various things that they do. Since<br />
2005 we've been sending volunteer teams. We're not the only ones<br />
sending volunteer teams down there to build houses and do<br />
healthcare and do stuff with the kids. So we started with 26 and by<br />
the end of the year we'll be well over 150 volunteers. We'll have<br />
three weeks this summer, I'll have 135 over three weeks this<br />
summer.<br />
<br />
It started in our backyard and one of the reasons that we wanted<br />
to...It started in the church and we started the organization<br />
partially because it's easier to raise money if you're not a church<br />
and it's also easier to make the volunteer opportunities available<br />
to people. If you say "Oh I'm going to Guatemala." "Oh I'd love to<br />
go with you! Who's going?" "It's my church." "Oh."<br />
<br />
But, if it's this local non-profit it's more appealing and we've<br />
really succeeded in doing that because we have people not only from<br />
in our own community, but this year we're going to have a family<br />
from Oklahoma, about six families from Texas, several people from<br />
Florida.<br />
<br />
David: You got the Virginia.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Virginia. It's like oh my goodness. How is this happening?<br />
<br />
Kevin: And everyone goes out to Guatemala and does the [inaudible<br />
01:22:31] ?<br />
[cross talk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. We all meet in Guatemala. I have three teams. One each week,<br />
and I'll be there the whole time and they'll come down and probably<br />
each team will build two or three houses. They'll do medical<br />
clinic, they'll do day camp for kids, soccer or baseball, sports<br />
things.<br />
They were about teenagers, so they love to do the...Everybody does<br />
construction in the morning. Then, in the afternoon teenage girls<br />
and some of the boys who want to do other stuff will help out with<br />
these other kid-related activities. That's what I'm doing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My wife is in Africa this week and last doing something similar.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Cool.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Which is why I have to leave shortly to go get my kids.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: What part of Africa is she in?<br />
<br />
Kevin: She did some stuff for Special Olympics. Then, they were helping<br />
build something at a food bank. I don't know that much yet, because<br />
she's not home yet.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Cool.<br />
<br />
David: That's terrific. She'll be changed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: She keeps telling that she wished I could've come, and I do, too.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You have this kid. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: We've got the two kids. The six-year-old doesn't feed herself real<br />
well.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: She can't drive to school.<br />
<br />
David: Your annual budget has gone from 0 to what? Are you going to hit<br />
about 150, 200,000 this year?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's over 300 already.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, OK. [laughs] 300.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's small potatoes compared to...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: As my boss, the Chairman of the Board, and I'm the only employee,<br />
is fond of saying, "The people out there don't realize that we're<br />
just a bunch of schlumps sitting around a table making this stuff<br />
up as we go along. Very good leadership. He's a very good leader.<br />
<br />
David: We were trying to maybe see if we can touch base with the Gates<br />
Foundation when we were up there. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: We got a brochure into his hands.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we got a brochure into his hands and some other stuff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was Bill Gates there?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah. I had a picture of him that I had taken at the first<br />
Altair convention in 1976, before he had actually made the deal<br />
with Altair to develop BASIC. He had said, "I can do it," but they<br />
hadn't signed the whole thing. I've got a picture of him as a 20-<br />
year-old or thereabouts, talking at this little convention.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You showed it to him?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. I gave him a copy. The problem I had is that...some people<br />
keep everything. I pretty much give everything away.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, you are lying. You keep everything.<br />
<br />
David: I do keep a lot of stuff. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Then, you give it away later. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Well, when Stan Freiberger was putting together the "Fire in<br />
the Valley" book, I gave him a lot of photographs and I gave him<br />
the originals. Then the publisher said, "It's not good enough. The<br />
photo. You get the negative." OK, they're gone. Never any of that<br />
came back. In fact, what I had to do is scan the photo from the<br />
book to make the print to give to Bill.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Photos of being young and cute.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was his Woody Allen phase. He looked exactly like Woody Allen<br />
did at that phase in his life.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:26:30] too.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm sure there is.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It is a lot [inaudible 01:26:33] .<br />
<br />
David: She improves with age. Every year.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I saw the picture! You look the same.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, the instant Paul Allen showed up, of course, everybody's<br />
mingling around this museum. All of a sudden there was like an<br />
arrow head over in that direction.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was this sucking sound.<br />
<br />
David: And then Bill shows up and, oh my God, everybody has to go see<br />
Bill.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was talking to Bob Rynett this morning, the guy who organized it,<br />
and he said, "Oh, Paul was very happy. Paul was very pleased with<br />
the way the event went." He said his only regret was that he and<br />
Bill didn't have enough time to spend with the people. And I'm<br />
thinking, "Well, OK, if you just stayed a little longer."<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Well, at least Paul Allen did come to the dinner.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, he stayed a little longer, but Bill, he was in and out like<br />
a...<br />
<br />
David: Bill was there for maybe an hour.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He just showed up because he had to.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, exactly. It was a cameo.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:27:52] cameo there?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, yes. There I am. I was thinner then. Oh! There's Ted in his<br />
hat! And Peter [inaudible 01:28:02] . Who's that guy?<br />
<br />
David: Dick Heiser was at the convention and he had one of the hats. The<br />
Xanadu hat.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was wearing one of those hats. The rings were actually silver.<br />
Oh and there's Johnny Anderson. He's the one that wrote that<br />
crazy...<br />
<br />
This was our building.<br />
<br />
David: That was the greenhouse garage building that we started. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: And there was a hole. Was it you or my brother that made a hole in<br />
the wall for an air conditioner?<br />
<br />
David: It was your brother.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And the building was painted white after...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is that the air conditioner? You comment about the low tech air<br />
conditioning.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, that was in an actual window. This building had been painted<br />
white after and right about here a hole had been made in the wall<br />
for this through-the-wall air conditioner. It was rented and when<br />
we moved out, we had this hole in the wall. So, my brother takes<br />
this spare ceiling panel that we had. It was white and sort of<br />
stuffed it in the hole and filled it up so that it really didn't<br />
show any more. We never heard any more about it.<br />
<br />
David: That building today is...<br />
<br />
Betsy: They've made it very fancy.<br />
<br />
David: Oh my gosh! It's a boutique shop and it's really nice. And they<br />
didn't even tear it down. It wasn't a tear-down and rebuild. At any<br />
event, we were not into spending money on facilities. Absolutely<br />
not. The last place that we were in was a printing company had<br />
owned it and they had taken three very small houses that backed up<br />
to railroad tracks and then they built a large warehouse at the end<br />
that was relatively modern. Then they just connected the three<br />
houses with little walkway and so we were in the first house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You couldn't tell that it was two houses.<br />
<br />
David: No. The art department was in the second, then the software group<br />
was in the third one. We had our fulfillment and storage and stuff<br />
in the warehouse.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How much money did you spend on the facility?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not much.<br />
<br />
David: We were spending money on expansion, growing, grow, grow. Then Ziff<br />
Davis comes in, they say, "You got this wonderful warehouse."<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's our warehouse now, right?<br />
<br />
David: That's right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It wasn't though, because you owned it.<br />
<br />
David: I know, but in any event, they said we're going to use it. We're<br />
moving some of your operation, advertising, sales into New York,<br />
therefore you will have more space. It wasn't the trade-off of the<br />
same kind of space or anything. What they did is, they have all<br />
these other magazines at that point, things like "Popular Boating"<br />
and "Yachting" and everything else. All of those magazines, when<br />
you subscribed you got a premium. You got a tote bag or something.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A backpack or a cushion.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. They moved all of their premium fulfillment out to our<br />
warehouse. They said, "Because you're not going to have a software<br />
department anymore, so you won't have to ship any software. We're<br />
going to bring all of our premiums out there." We still have<br />
"Yachting" bags.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yachting bags and seat bags.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Speaking of fulfillment that was something that we did. We were<br />
real pioneers in doing our own fulfillment.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: That's true...<br />
<br />
Betsy: All magazines then used fulfillment houses. You would just send all<br />
the little cards and white mail and everything to your fulfillment<br />
house and they would just take care, enter it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Reader service cards and...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Exactly, and then they would send the labels.<br />
<br />
David: Everything went either to Boulder, Colorado, Des Moines, Iowa, or<br />
some place in Florida.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So when you say pioneers, does that mean you were cheap?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well no, because we were not getting good service, we weren't happy<br />
with the service the readers were getting. And so we decided to<br />
bring it in it house, and we brought a program from a company in<br />
Boston that had written a program to run a PDP11.<br />
And we did we brought the whole thing in-house. We had our own data<br />
entry people. Did all the caging, taking the money out in-house.<br />
Printed our own labels and ship, because then you had to print them<br />
and ship them because there was no electronic delivery.<br />
<br />
David: You know we were real pioneers there and we did spent some money.<br />
Because PDP1170 was not a low-end, with a platter and disk, 12<br />
inch, maybe 15 inch, but a big, big platter drive, and data entry<br />
terminals, DECWriters, VT05. And when Ziff came in, I mean they<br />
were blown away that we were doing our own fulfillment, and doing a<br />
very efficiently.<br />
And the other thing we were doing also was the reader service<br />
cards. We were doing all our own processing of that. The same<br />
computer is same system. A Mini Data System, that's what it was.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No.<br />
<br />
David: No? OK.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mini data was the one you were using...<br />
<br />
[Day 2]<br />
<br />
<br />
David: A couple of the questions you asked yesterday got us to thinking<br />
about things we probably should have mentioned or clarified.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK let's go, let me grab a pen.<br />
<br />
David: One of the corrections, Betsy remembered better than I. the<br />
embezzlement that we were talking about was actually 79 not 78 it<br />
doesn't make a lot of difference but was a year later. It was a<br />
year after I had left my day job, and I was really depending upon<br />
Creative Computing for my income and everything else. So to lose<br />
that was a big blow at that time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So that could have been the end of things right there?<br />
<br />
David: Yes absolutely it could have.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was 79 not 78, is what you're saying.<br />
<br />
David: That's what I said it was 79 not 78.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I was going to ask you to move closer to the microphone.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Actually I don't have to do this. My ego is completely uninvolved.<br />
I would go sit and play with the cats.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Please, please be here. You supplement Dave's memory.<br />
<br />
David: Yes exactly she's very good at that.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: I want to know, how are you going to know how to spell things? He<br />
used the name John Dilks. If you go to write it out, how do you<br />
know how to spell John Dilks?<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'll either Google it, and if it's not in Wikipedia, I'll have to<br />
come back to you and ask, or if they're mentioned in the magazines.<br />
I'll do my best.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm not saying it in a critical way, I'm just impressed that you<br />
don't ask.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just feel this way, I can have everything. I don't have to write<br />
it down. I can concentrate on the conversation, rather than taking<br />
notes.<br />
<br />
David: OK. One thing I thought would be kind of worthwhile...putting the<br />
whole era of the early computer magazines into a perspective. In a<br />
sense, personal computing itself went through several eras as it<br />
accelerated and became so widespread. It certainly didn't start<br />
that way.<br />
You almost have to look at a period before there were personal<br />
computers -- the pre-personal computer era, which I would say would<br />
be 1972 or so up through '75, when the first computers came out.<br />
What was happening then was you had big time-sharing systems.<br />
<br />
Then, manufacturers like DEC and HP were making smaller time-<br />
sharing systems for terminals on a computer. Specifically, Bob<br />
Albrecht opened up People's Computer Company down in San Carlos,<br />
San Mateo, one of the "Sans." It was an open to the public place.<br />
What were people going to do with computers? Well, he wrote this<br />
book of what to do after you hit return, of games.<br />
<br />
Then I wrote my book, not for his center, but for people in the<br />
east that had access to the same type of things on DEC computers.<br />
Those two books actually came out in '72. That was well<br />
before....There was an impetus for people to use computers. Even<br />
though it was mini-computers and they didn't really have their own,<br />
they did have access.<br />
<br />
That, I think, was an important thing because, then, when the kit<br />
computers first came out, which is '75, we really had the kit<br />
computer era from '75 to around '78. That's when it primary was,<br />
the do-it-yourself, build-it-yourself.<br />
<br />
Who did those computers appeal to? It was largely people who were<br />
OK with things like soldering guns. That was largely HAM radio<br />
people. You look at "73" magazine and "Radio Electronics," those<br />
were the ones that dragged the hardware people into the field, and<br />
"Popular Electronics," of course, with the Altair in January, '75.<br />
<br />
You had to know something about, and be a little bit capable with<br />
your hands to get into it. That continued but dwindled off by 1980,<br />
because of course, in '78, you had the three biggies, not biggies,<br />
but self-contained, assembled computers: the Commodore PET, TRS-80,<br />
and the Apple all came out in '78. They were proprietary platforms,<br />
nobody was sharing stuff.<br />
<br />
Actually, the S-100 bus was more shareable. More people got a card<br />
that you could plug into the S-100 bus. There was more, but on the<br />
other hand, you had to build it. That was really a stumbling block<br />
for a lot of people. Then processor technology with the SAL. OK,<br />
here's an S-100 bus machine, but it's all built. That was a big<br />
leap.<br />
<br />
Anyway, you had the, what I call, proprietary era from '78 to '82.<br />
Then it kind of dwindled off, although Apple certainly kept going.<br />
When the IBM PC came out, '81, '82, '83, that ushered in the<br />
standardization era. Everybody, "OK, we're going to make an IBM PC<br />
clone." It was really only Apple, and to a lesser extent, the Atari<br />
and the Commodore that kept going with their own proprietary stuff.<br />
They really couldn't keep going.<br />
<br />
At that time, we started working with Atari. They using the same<br />
chip that Apple had. I thought, "Man, that's an opportunity. Why<br />
don't they just make an agreement with Apple to run Apple software<br />
and everything." They got a 6502, that family of chips in there,<br />
why not? But that wasn't Atari's way of doing things, as you well<br />
know.<br />
<br />
In any event, they went through those stages. As a new one came<br />
along, the other one died off. That though then affected the<br />
magazines, Creative Computing, we came from the pre-era, in a<br />
sense. From the education applications and people having access to<br />
small, minicomputer time sharing systems. When Altair basic was<br />
announced, then it was the obvious thing that we would port over<br />
programs to that.<br />
<br />
Other magazines such as "Byte" and some of the hardware magazines,<br />
they really came from the HAM radio end of things. Wayne Green, who<br />
started "Byte," was publishing "73," which was the biggest magazine<br />
in HAM radio. HAM fests were one of the earliest places where<br />
computers were, or at least hardware, do-it-yourself computers were<br />
really seen and popularized. Wasn't till a little later that we had<br />
computer festivals.<br />
<br />
The real early computer festivals in '75, '76, had a big overlap<br />
with Ham radio. The early ones in New Jersey. That was the earliest<br />
ones. It was, I think, more, not more, but at least half was<br />
oriented to Ham radio. Then, it broadened out, of course, with more<br />
applications being reproduced. Anyway, I think it's kind of<br />
important to know how things fit into that whole scheme of things.<br />
<br />
Magazines either came from the Ham radio and hardware side of<br />
things. They had a different perspective than those like Creative<br />
Computing.<br />
<br />
Well, Peoples' Computer Company, Bob Aldberg, could have had a real<br />
winning magazine, but he was too much in the alternative mode. So,<br />
Peoples' Computer Company never really made it as a magazine. He<br />
didn't want to do advertising or anything that would...<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was a different avenue. It was more like a tabloid-style<br />
newspaper.<br />
<br />
David: Newspaper, yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was more glossy.<br />
<br />
David: Exactly.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was a very different field.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Again, magazine publishing. I remember, early on, I was on a<br />
TV show. McNeil Lehrer Report on Public Broadcasting. Life Magazine<br />
was being re-launched and Time-Warner was spending a ton of money<br />
on this re-launch. They had the publisher of Life Magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was probably Time-Life back then. I don't think it...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. That's right. It wasn't Time. Well, I think it was close to<br />
the time that they merged. Anyway. Yeah. It was Time-Life. Then,<br />
they had me. Sort of the opposite extreme.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You're going to be covered in cat hair by the time you're here.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, I am sure.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's OK. But it matches and sort of goes with it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. It matches fine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You have kind of a theme here. The black and white.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes. Yes. Sorry to interrupt.<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, they were interviewing both of us. They were going to spend<br />
more money on their first issue than our entire annual budget, for<br />
everything. The difference in big publishers, because we we're<br />
talking about that a little bit yesterday, is huge. Really huge.<br />
Now, the interesting thing is there was a magazine back then. I<br />
don't know if it's still around today, called Folio. It was a<br />
magazine for magazine publishers. They covered all aspects of it.<br />
Subscription fulfillment, typesetting and everything else and the<br />
business aspects of running a magazine.<br />
<br />
They had some figures, which were true for a long period of time.<br />
That one out of seven magazine startups makes it for one year. One<br />
out of seven. That's low. Of those, one out of seven makes it for<br />
five years. So, were talking about...<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think Wayne told me almost the exact same statistic.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. One out of 50 new magazines makes it for five years or more.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: Once you make it five years, you're probably good to go for awhile.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
The new Life Magazine comes back, roaring back in. Where are they<br />
today, or even 10 years later from that point. Gone. Didn't make<br />
it. In any event, yesterday we were talking a little bit about<br />
where did we put all our money.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
David: Well, all our money wasn't an awful lot compared to big publishers.<br />
We were a small player. We're big in that field, but...<br />
<br />
Kevin: You're a big fish in a little bowl.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Yeah. There wasn't a lot. Betsy reminded me this morning that<br />
one of the things we did to, in a sense, keep control, is we bought<br />
our own typesetting equipment.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Used of course.<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Used.<br />
<br />
David: Used. Yes. We didn't want to send stuff out to a typesetter<br />
where...what did you [inaudible 00:14:22] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was the same thing with the fulfillment. You are sending it to a<br />
service that gives your work to a minimum wage person who couldn't<br />
care less. Puts her time in and...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Plus you still had code and things that needed to be done right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Done right. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Otherwise it was useless.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. We didn't typeset the code usually. We would actually pace<br />
down the printouts. Part of it was for efficiency and probably, in<br />
the long run, it was cheaper. Just to turn your typesetting around,<br />
send it out and wait for your galleys to come back. Then you<br />
proofread them. Then you'd send it back. Then they make the<br />
corrections maybe and you get it back again. So we said, well...and<br />
then we got this used, copy graphic was it?<br />
<br />
David: Mm-hmm. Yep.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Typesetter. Found a young woman who knew typesetting and hired her.<br />
We bought our own stat camera. We always used to have to send all<br />
the stats and [inaudible 00:15:34] out to be made.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: That was huge then before...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Had our own darkroom.<br />
<br />
David: ...everything was computerized publishing. Yeah. We had our own<br />
darkroom and our own stat camera with the thing that goes over a<br />
screen basically to make it into dots.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: To do that. To make those negatives or [inaudible 00:15:56] , which<br />
are the positive. That was something again. You sent it out and you<br />
get it back.<br />
I said, "Oh, you know what, we got a little more type here than<br />
expected. We want to crop this. Well, we send it out again, and oh<br />
my gosh." Doing all of that in-house, but it cost money. In a<br />
sense, just for the hardware and capital improvements that you<br />
needed to do that.<br />
<br />
We were spending it on that and expansion into other things like<br />
the software. One of the other ones that I was thinking of that we<br />
did, that certainly, really didn't bring us any tangible reward,<br />
was that we were doing some consulting when we started developing<br />
software. We started doing consulting to places like the<br />
Exploratorium in San Francisco. And Sesame Place. That was a big<br />
one for us.<br />
<br />
Sesame Place was a theme park right in our own backyard in New<br />
Jersey. They were going to have these terminals that you could go<br />
up to. One of the programs was Mix and Match the Muppets. You could<br />
take different parts of Muppets and combine them. We wrote a part<br />
of that routine and a whole bunch of stuff that made computers and<br />
these things not computers but approachable things for kids.<br />
<br />
We did some work for the Capital Children's Museum in Washington<br />
and Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Again, did it help us?<br />
Maybe. Did we gain a little reputation? Maybe. Did it translate to<br />
the bottom line? Probably not. As Betsy said, it was fun for you to<br />
do that, wasn't it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, it was fun. It gave him fun things to do.<br />
<br />
David: That was one way that we, in a sense, spent some money.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It makes sense. You guys were the computer experts, probably by<br />
orders of magnitude. Who are they going to go to?<br />
<br />
David: That's right. Interactive games, yeah. I already had a good selling<br />
book out there that was visible, known. We did a lot of that kind<br />
of stuff. Some of it was just fun to do. Another place where we put<br />
I won't say a lot of money but we went to a lot of these shows,<br />
well, there were some that were strictly personal computer shows,<br />
but then also tried to push into things like the consumer<br />
electronics show.<br />
We were the only magazine at the consumer electronics. That's a<br />
huge, huge show. Twice a year, one in Chicago and one in Las Vegas.<br />
We'd take the smallest booth that you could but, still, it was a<br />
fair chunk of change to go to that, but that's how I felt we got<br />
the reach. They were pushing at a lower level. That was video games<br />
mostly at that point. Although we weren't in that market, I just<br />
felt that that was someplace that we wanted to be.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you think that was worthwhile?<br />
<br />
David: I don't know. We were mainly looking for retail stores to sell the<br />
magazine. That was my main purpose for going there. No, it probably<br />
wasn't. It probably was not and it cost us a lot of money to go to<br />
the shows. You have to experiment and do those things. We started<br />
reporting on new developments at the consumer electronics show and<br />
there was some overlap with Computer Inc but it was mostly video<br />
games. No, it didn't have a real good payoff. [laughs]<br />
Then there was the Boston show we went to where Betsy's feistiness<br />
really came out. You go to those shows. I'm not talking about one<br />
of these local computer shows or something. You go to a big show.<br />
You've got to use union labor. We had a computer at our booth. We<br />
wanted to plug it in. You're going to plug in your computer? No,<br />
you can't plug it in. You've got to hire an electrician for an hour<br />
for $75 to plug in your computer.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was a bit extreme. I don't think that was actually true.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know how much it was but you had to use union labor for<br />
different things. Betsy took exception to that at one show and<br />
actually came to blows.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was carrying stuff off the show floor. We were trying to get out.<br />
It was in Boston and we were going to drive back and we were trying<br />
to...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Go home at the end of the show?<br />
<br />
Betsy: ...go home at the end of the show. We were just carrying our<br />
cartons of leftover magazines and books and some union guy comes to<br />
me and starts telling me you can't do this and he was being very<br />
rude. So I punched him in the arm. [laughs] They were not happy.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you have to hire a special punching person to do that?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yes, exactly. I should have consulted with the shop steward before<br />
doing that.<br />
<br />
David: There was a follow-up to that. I'm not absolutely sure but I think<br />
the guy that was running that show was Shelley Adelman. He then<br />
approached us after that little incident. You can't do this. Betsy<br />
was really in his face about come on. We're a tiny little nit. Sure<br />
we can do it. We can carry our own stuff.<br />
Shelley Adelman, whose name you probably heard today, in a sense,<br />
got his start by running these smaller shows around the country and<br />
then he built up to running PC Expo in New York and Las Vegas and<br />
then he got into you run a show in Las Vegas you've got to make<br />
deals with the hotels and so on.<br />
<br />
The earlier PC shows in Las Vegas did not use the convention<br />
center. They were held in I think probably the Hilton. He got to<br />
know hotel people there and he started buying into hotels and today<br />
Shelley Adelman is huge. Not Caesars but he owns one of the really<br />
big casino operations. He's on Forbes list of top 100 wealthiest<br />
Americans.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sure he only uses union labor.<br />
<br />
David: I'm sure he does, absolutely. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's how he got where he is.<br />
<br />
David: We've crossed paths with some interesting people in different ways.<br />
There was another one I was thinking of. Actually, this is jumping<br />
around a little bit. Editorial, in different people submitting<br />
articles and then some people I would ask would you do something<br />
for us early, early on. That's another thing we went to. I went to<br />
comic cons and the sci-fi cons to promote the magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was early.<br />
<br />
David: That was early, very early. I've got to tell you one little<br />
incident there. I also went to small press publisher conventions. I<br />
went to one over Labor Day weekend, and I don't know what year it<br />
was. It was probably '75, '76 maybe. The place that they gave this<br />
small press to exhibit was one platform up in the subway under<br />
Lincoln Center.<br />
Lincoln Center, of course, huge, but down one level is not shops.<br />
There may be a few shops but it was a big, open platform. That's<br />
where we were exhibiting. I had my magazines out there on a table<br />
and I was talking to these other underground publishers and so on,<br />
typical.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's why they put you there. It's underground.<br />
<br />
David: Underground, yes. It was a Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Saturday,<br />
Sunday, Monday. I said, "I can't be here on Sunday." Talked to the<br />
person next to me and I said, "I'm just going to leave a cigar box<br />
that says put your money in the box." He said, "You're nuts. We're<br />
in a New York subway system. You're going to come back with nothing<br />
in your box." I left a bunch of change in it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: And your ex-wife said you were too trusting.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] Yes. I left like 15 single dollar bills in there so people<br />
could make change and I just left it there, from Saturday to Monday<br />
and I came back Monday, about $40, $50 in the box. I don't know<br />
whether it paid for everything that was taken but it worked out<br />
fine. Yes, I was obviously too trusting, but at roughly the same<br />
time there was something going on. I think it was a sci-fi<br />
convention or world future society. Yeah, it was world future<br />
society convention.<br />
They had some notable people there. I was sitting down with Alvin<br />
Toffler in the lobby of the Colosseum and along comes over to us<br />
Isaac [inaudible 00:27:03] (ED: from context, they are talking about<br />
Isaac Asimov). What a wonderful little party. We had some coffee in<br />
the Colosseum and I said, "Isaac, can you write me an article?"<br />
"I got a good story from the robot series that hasn't been widely<br />
used or published and you can use that." So I got an early <br />
contribution from Isaac [inaudible 00:27:27] and Alvin<br />
Toffler wrote something for us.<br />
<br />
Anyway, got to know some interesting people at that point. Then who<br />
should submit an article, and by this time Betsy was the editor...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Out of transom comes an article from Michael Creighton. It was a<br />
program. I can't remember what it was about.<br />
<br />
David: For the Apple.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was a program for the Apple, but it was something really dumb.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know if you remember, we were reminded when Harry Garland<br />
was up at the thing in Seattle. Harry Garland was one of the first<br />
ones to produce an independent manufactured a board, a 100 bus<br />
board, for the Altair, and this was really early, and he called it<br />
the TV Dazzler. It made little squares light up but he could make<br />
lots of them light up in different colors or just a few. It was a<br />
silly program but people said we can do graphics on this.<br />
He eventually developed it into quite an interesting graphics tool,<br />
I guess. People did buy the TV Dazzler for itself but the purpose<br />
was here's a board you could produce graphics, do some graphics. In<br />
any event, that's essentially what Michael Creighton's program did<br />
for the Apple. Not much.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This was not early on.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, it was after the Apple 2 was out.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was probably...<br />
<br />
David: '80.<br />
<br />
Betsy: 1980, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you publish it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. I rejected it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: I'm like we're going to reject an article from Michael Creighton?<br />
<br />
Betsy: We both liked Michael Creighton as an article.<br />
<br />
David: Oh my gosh. But we did. We really did. We had standards.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Later on, though, he wrote something. It was better. It wasn't<br />
great. He did write something better and we did accept it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Orson Scott Card wrote for Compute, I think. I don't know if he was<br />
Orson Scott Card at that point, but [inaudible 00:30:00] .<br />
<br />
David: We've crossed paths with some people.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [inaudible 00:30:09] was actually very nice<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, 6 foot 8, big guy. He was very nice. Unfortunately, he died.<br />
On the other end of things, early on, we really were...this was<br />
probably even before Betsy got in...kind of in the small press<br />
underground publishing movement as much as in the legitimate big<br />
magazines, because that's kind of where I started.<br />
<br />
Betsy: When I came, we had just published the first sleek, coated paper<br />
magazine and coated stock. In October 1978, I believe, that was<br />
published. That was the first of the coated stock. That was kind of<br />
the bridge to legitimacy.<br />
<br />
David: For the first two years, [inaudible 00:31:09] news print and I had<br />
a little tie in with some of the small press people. I was learning<br />
about publishing from small press review, I got to know some of the<br />
people who were doing successful publishing. A lot of them were<br />
magazines and comics out of San Francisco.<br />
So I got to know a little bit [inaudible 00:31:46] and Gilbert<br />
Shelton and Sherry Flannigan, and some of those early, Bobby<br />
London. So anyway, one ad we ran real early on was an adaptation of<br />
Renee and Robert Crompton. Go ahead and change my thing to creative<br />
computing. Go for it. Sherry Flannigan she did a comic strip called<br />
Tronch and Bonnie, Tronch was a little dog and Bonnie was a little<br />
girl and they occasionally got mixed up with a robot dog.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there some sort of falling out with that person?<br />
<br />
David: With Sherry? No. I'm still friends with her on Facebook. They had a<br />
major, major problem, she was involved with Gary Hallgrin and I<br />
forget who the publisher was, McNeil, Bobby London. They were the<br />
Air Pirates funniest group that Disney took to task, that caused<br />
the death of a lot of publishing in the underground comics<br />
movement.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I don't understand.<br />
<br />
David: Air Pirates were funny, they were just looking for trouble. They<br />
had Disney characters flying planes and getting into all kinds of<br />
trouble and getting into problems that Disney characters never<br />
would have done, sexual problems as well as just acting badly.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Disney just said, "We can't put up with this." It was an<br />
interesting case, because was it a copyright violation, not really<br />
because they were character look-a-likes, but they weren't calling<br />
them Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck but they looked the same or very<br />
similar. But, it was a landmark case in underground comics, it<br />
caused a lot of them to pull back, a lot on the satire and stuff<br />
that they were publishing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I asked about Sherry because a number of years ago when I had first<br />
put the best of [inaudible 00:34:29] on my website, then after a<br />
while I got an email saying, "Look, you have to take this<br />
[inaudible 00:34:37] ." I would copyright all, it was just like<br />
waving arms. So I took it down but it was, I thought, maybe it<br />
was...<br />
<br />
David: Well that whole copyright trademark thing, there interpretation<br />
that really, really strict...everything that goes on the Internet<br />
is a public domain. Well, that is not really true either. Are you<br />
making money from copyrighted material? If you are then that's a<br />
pretty clear violation. Are you affecting the copyright owners<br />
ability to make money with it? That's a violation.<br />
I'm kind of in this right now with Uruguay and TinTin, those books<br />
have inspired a lot of people to make parodies and fake TinTin<br />
covers. TinTin at the beach, places TinTin wouldn't normally go.<br />
Well is it affecting the sales of TinTin books, or is it actually<br />
increasingly them?<br />
<br />
Casterman, who owns and [inaudible 00:36:07] owns the TinTin<br />
copyrights. They are really going after some of these people, but<br />
I'm not sure that they have a really good case. So some people take<br />
everything off and don't want nothing on the website. And others<br />
are saying, "Hey, this is legitimate." I have collected a lot of<br />
those covers, and put them up on a website.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I guess you'll find out soon enough.<br />
<br />
David: I will find out, soon enough.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They may not be right legally, but how hard do you want to fight<br />
it.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: I think that they have to demonstrate that it's hurting them in<br />
some way. One last thing, from the question you asked yesterday,<br />
back to the money issue, when I sold the magazine, right at that<br />
time I took 15 percent of what I had received, and donated it to<br />
charities. I have in a sense signed on, although not as an official<br />
signee to the Gates-Buffet initiative to give away half of my<br />
wealth, while I am alive.<br />
At one point in time you can compute that, I have already given<br />
away more than I have received for Creative Computing to Charity.<br />
Of course, it had grown a little bit and we made reasonably decent<br />
investments and that is why it continued to grow. But, I'm really<br />
committed to doing that. My kids are not going to inherit it all.<br />
That's just the way it is, that is the way I believe. Put my money<br />
where my heart is. Anyway,<br />
<br />
Kevin: Other question is, you said something yesterday, I should follow up<br />
that one. You said something about stealing Basic.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well there was this big thing. Just the night before last, at this<br />
dinner we went to, where all the people who were at the first MITS<br />
conference and they referred to the letter that Bill Gates wrote.<br />
<br />
Kevin: "Why are you stealing my software?"<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well exactly. That was just a reference to that Bill Gates, which<br />
had just been brought back to my memory by that. People were<br />
telling stories at this. Instead of having an after dinner speaker<br />
they were just passing the mic around and people were talking about<br />
incidents and things from the past.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you get to sell the story to this group of...?<br />
<br />
David: Not really, I was just followed up on something [inaudible<br />
00:39:24] .<br />
<br />
Betsy: Some of those stories were really boring.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: Oh yeah, long and boring. It's an interesting thing though, about<br />
basic itself, but it was developed at an educational institution<br />
originally by Kemeny and Kurtz at Dartmouth. And they, either<br />
deliberately or because they had gotten a lot of grant money from<br />
General Electric in the early time sharing systems, they basically<br />
let anybody use their Basic.<br />
It was developed at Dartmouth but later Honeywell put a system in<br />
at Minnesota or Florida or someplace else. They could use Basic,<br />
they could have a no license fee or anything. That made Basic a<br />
universal language that was available, at least that version of<br />
Basic. If you write a different version of Basic, where does that<br />
fall? These are some sort of violation and you need some<br />
permission. And basically Kemeny and Kurtz said, "No, you don't."<br />
And they allowed Basic to be used and developed by others.<br />
<br />
Digital Equipment, at the same time, maybe even earlier, but<br />
roughly the same time, had developed also an interactive language<br />
called Focal. And Focal in many regards was more efficient than<br />
Basic, because they were running it on many computer and there was<br />
less memory to work with. On the other hand, and this was true<br />
Digital...as time went on, they said, "No, nobody can use Focal. We<br />
are not going to let, especially those people [inaudible 00:41:59]<br />
." But any place else, nobody could use Focal.<br />
<br />
I think it wound up with a situation like Sony and Betamax. Sony<br />
saying, "Betamax is ours and it is a better format that VHS," which<br />
it was. But then, JVC saying, "We have VHS and Toshiba. Hey do you<br />
want to use it? Fine, we'll license it to you for next to nothing."<br />
<br />
Kevin: You think Focal could have been Basic.<br />
<br />
David: I think it could have been very big. I think it could there could<br />
have been very serious competition between the two languages, but<br />
by Digital limiting it only to their own computers and specifically<br />
to their mini computers, not even the big mainframes, it really<br />
limited the spread of Focal. In fact, it forced me to go out to the<br />
developers and people in educational institutions they wanted<br />
Basic.<br />
There were few schools and colleges in Boston area, near DEC that<br />
were OK with Focal. But stuff was getting published by Minnesota<br />
Educational Computer Consortium and others in Basic, [inaudible<br />
00:43:32] computer project. So they wanted Basic. [laughs] I had to<br />
go on. I hired one group, actually it turned out to be just an<br />
individual guy in Brooklyn that developed a Basic for 4KPDP8. Well<br />
Basic took 3.5K, I gave you 500 words, 512 bit not even the 16 bit,<br />
at least get 2 bits per...but 500 words the right programs. Wasn't<br />
much.<br />
<br />
So that forced Lunar Lander and [inaudible 00:44:15] and some of<br />
those programs actually. Some of them I imported over from Focal<br />
into Basic. And then we had a machine that had 8K. We had a<br />
different version of Basic because Hewlett Packard had a machine<br />
that read cards, mark sense cards. We had to have a different<br />
version of basic for that. Then we had a timeshare Basic. We had<br />
six versions of Basic, five actually on the PDP8 family. It was<br />
absurd, it was crazy, but we had to do it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I was going to ask you, the process of like...you started<br />
saying...you interrupted yourself. You said, "People would submit<br />
articles and then..." I don't know what you were going to say next.<br />
But [inaudible 00:45:08] that I wanted to ask you like just the<br />
process of how the magazine got made. You got an article was,<br />
somebody just typed up or something and...<br />
<br />
Betsy: You mean the mechanics of the production?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We can receive most of the articles for the magazine came over the<br />
transom. And we would get these articles and our editorial system<br />
would log them in and pass them around to editorial staff. John<br />
Anderson and Russell [inaudible 00:45:42] .<br />
<br />
David: Peter Fee.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Peter Fee.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What does it mean over the transom?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Means they weren't solicited. Somebody in the middle of the night<br />
jumped to know [laughs] or through the mailbox. We put a little<br />
piece of paper on there and the guys would write their opinions.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] That is serious.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Some of the things they said. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Like what? What would they say?<br />
<br />
Betsy: "Don't quit your day job." [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: And then they had the rubber stamp.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Somebody found a stamp. Everything that we had was used, including<br />
our desk and everything. And somebody found, at the back of the<br />
desk, a stamp. It said San Marcos on it. This was like the ultimate<br />
insult. [laughs] San Marcos, like you know, "Get out of here."<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Send it to San Marcos?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Send it to San Marcos, wherever that was. Ultimately, I would make<br />
the final decision whether we were going to publish this or not.<br />
Once we were well established, the vast majority of them went back.<br />
We never returned manuscripts. And they would come with piles of<br />
code. A lot of them were programs and, we would decide and the<br />
editorial assistants job to notify the person. Then we bought all<br />
rights, didn't we?<br />
<br />
David: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
Betsy: North American Serial rights, that's what we bought for everything.<br />
Then they would go into a cube. Sometimes we would say something,<br />
"Oh, this is going to go really well with this educational<br />
institute that we're doing in June," Like that one is for June or<br />
just put it in the queue and we will see when it comes or rises to<br />
the top or whatever.<br />
The more technical editors like, John Anderson, he was our best guy<br />
ever. They would go through the code and make sure the code worked,<br />
and I would edit them for content and correct them.<br />
<br />
David: For English and Grammar.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, with a pen and pencil. Then they would go to our typesetter.<br />
Typesetter would correct them. And then they would come back, and I<br />
think, our lower level editorial assistant would proofread them,<br />
but proofread a lot of them too. When they came out typesetter, it<br />
was on a smooth shiny paper.<br />
<br />
David: Photographic paper.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And then, if they had screenshots or anything the art department<br />
would make them into photo stats or [inaudible 00:49:02] . And then<br />
when it was time for them to go to press they would put them on<br />
boards, pieces of cardboard, white paper...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So you paste up?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, they do the paste up and put it on there.<br />
<br />
David: The boards were using non reproducing blue on its photograph. They<br />
had different outlines, blue defined columns, both two and three<br />
column pages and upper limits and page numbers and all that kind of<br />
stuff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: We were still doing it on [inaudible 00:49:43] newspaper in 1990.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well that's exactly it, so you know what we're talking about. And<br />
then once you get it all together and then again somebody has got<br />
to read it to make sure there is no lines left out, particularly of<br />
the programs. Make sure that those all still make sense. There were<br />
many cases where line got left out or artists cuts off a things and<br />
realizes, "Oh, I mean to cut it short." And that whole line<br />
disappears and then you send it off to be printed and all the<br />
subscribers get a little upset because Startrek doesn't run.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: So that sort of thing happened frequently or often?<br />
<br />
David: With typeset material, not much at all. But with program listings,<br />
program listings were really tough. Because you would have people<br />
that would submit something, and they'd have a really cheap, low-<br />
end dot matrix printer. And we always encouraged people, if you're<br />
going to submit a program, submit it in some machine-readable form.<br />
So we don't want to type them all in to make sure they work. Even<br />
though our readers are going to have to, but we don't want to have<br />
to do that. So send us. But even so, we might then print it off on<br />
one of our slightly higher end printers. But I'll tell you what,<br />
you have page breaks and everything else. And the Art department<br />
didn't have a clue about programs and stuff. The program would get<br />
stated down. We weren't using the full sized type for program<br />
listings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. At that point we hadn't the ability to make them fit.<br />
<br />
David: That's where the most common place that you'd lose a line or<br />
something. It would get photographed, and when it's coming out of a<br />
line printer, you might have one or two lines on the following<br />
page. "Oh, we forgot that."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Personally, I know it said so much about magazine that when it<br />
continued, there were just sometimes a handwritten area going,<br />
"Continued over here." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Oh, absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was a early.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It wasn't professional, and that was awesome. It was just like,<br />
"OK."<br />
<br />
Betsy: Then what we would do, we would request when we...we would solicit<br />
articles. Like if there was a new Apple peripheral that we wanted<br />
to review, we'd get the product. Then a lot of times, our own guys<br />
wanted to review the stuff, but if it was something that we didn't<br />
have time for, or that was better suited to one of our freelancers,<br />
we would send it out and ask for a review of it.<br />
A lot of reviews came in over the transom too, but we tried to be<br />
careful of those, that they were not either trying to justify their<br />
own purchase of whatever it was or get even with the publisher for<br />
producing it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Or written by the... [crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: That really wasn't an issue at the time, it was a more innocent<br />
time. That really didn't happen much, but it was, sometimes, people<br />
would get a product they didn't care for and totally bash it, then<br />
we have to go and figure out is it really that bad. We tend to not<br />
produce seriously negative...if it was a really bad product we just<br />
ignored it.<br />
<br />
David: We tried to be objective with reviews, but before I got into the<br />
computer field at all I was in market research. There are a number<br />
of biases, too, that really overwhelmingly affect all kinds of<br />
market research polls or surveys. One is that people think they're<br />
better than they are. For example, if we were doing a poll or a<br />
research study, we'd put a question on basically designed to show<br />
the executives who were using this data that there were some<br />
biases.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He's not talking about Creative Computing.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: No, no. This was way earlier. I'm talking about Proctor and Gamble<br />
products or general foods or that kind of thing. Anyways, the<br />
question we put on was "please rank your driving ability," and we<br />
had from well below average, accident waiting to happen up to Mario<br />
Andretti, Danica Patrick, over there. And you know what, 99 percent<br />
of the population ranked themselves better than the average. Where<br />
is your average then? Its way high.<br />
The other thing, equally pervasive in a sense, is that people<br />
wanted to justify a decision, a purchase decision. In fact, back<br />
the 30s, the slogan for Ford Motor Company was ask a man that owns<br />
one. You ask a man that owns and has made a decision to buy this<br />
car, he's going to say "Yeah, it is the greatest car." So you put<br />
on questions, again, throwaway questions.<br />
<br />
If you had this, or if you were an owner of whatever car it is that<br />
you have. "What do you have now? Would you buy another one?" People<br />
"Oh, yes. This is a great decision. I love this car." I'll tell you<br />
where you can find out, is you look at what percentage of people<br />
that did own that particular car did buy another one? They're<br />
always way lower than they those that say they would buy another<br />
one. It gets more pronounced with higher prices.<br />
<br />
If you've made a decision to buy a high-priced car, you're going to<br />
think, "I'll tell you what. This Land Rover was the best car I have<br />
ever bought." 78 percent of people might say, "I'm going to buy<br />
another one." About 15 percent of the people actually do.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So [inaudible 00:56:49] magazine because people want to justify a<br />
review.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. That's exactly right. And as Betsy said, it could go the<br />
other way, too. "I think I'm getting screwed here with this product<br />
and I'm going to knock it." When you get reviews, in essence, over<br />
the transom, they're either justifying, "This was really wonderful.<br />
I made a great decision buying this particular product," or "I hate<br />
it." It's hard to know whether the review was really objective and<br />
realistic.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you ever push-back from advertisers?<br />
<br />
David: All the time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Can you tell me?<br />
<br />
Betsy: We would feel the pushback from our ad sales people. They would say<br />
"So and so is annoyed with you because you didn't put it." We very<br />
rarely put anybody's totally negative reviews, but we tried to be<br />
objective, and not every product is perfect. Almost every product<br />
is going to have some negative feature.<br />
We would put those in and the advertisers would then go to their ad<br />
rep and complain. Then the ad rep would come to us and say, "Why<br />
are you doing this? These people are mad. I have to sell them ads."<br />
We would just say "Separation of church and State. You are<br />
advertising in this magazine because it's a credible magazine, and<br />
if we let you push us around, it won't be credible anymore, and<br />
then it will reflect on your ad."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you remember anyone ever pulling ads [inaudible 00:58:39] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't, offhand. Do you?<br />
<br />
David: No, but I can tell you the opposite. There were a couple of<br />
magazines that almost ran manufactured press releases as product<br />
reviews. They did get more advertising than we did from some<br />
manufacturers that liked that. I hate to name names, but Compute<br />
Magazine. I don't think you'll find any negative reviews in Compute<br />
Magazine. Everything was the greatest thing since sliced bread.<br />
Personal Computing, similar, very positive. "Gee whiz" reviews on<br />
almost all the things that they saw. It just isn't that way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You have talked about [inaudible 00:59:49] . We've talked briefly<br />
at least about the other magazines. Sync, the one about Timex<br />
Sinclair. I understand the allure of publishing a magazine geared<br />
to a specific system, but why did you pick Timex Sinclair? [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Probably two reasons. One is that we had more of a presence in<br />
England than most of the other magazines.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Still do.<br />
<br />
David: We had a very early agreement with David Tebbet, who was the co-<br />
publisher of Personal Computer, something-or-other. It might have<br />
been Personal Computer World. Yes, it was.<br />
<br />
Betsy Ahi: Yes it was Personal Computer World, and when PC world started they<br />
had to call it PC World because there was already a Personal<br />
Computer World in England.<br />
<br />
David: And we had an agreement that they would reprint materials from<br />
Creative Computing, which they did for a while but then they<br />
developed their own in-house capabilities and there was enough<br />
differences. We went to England and very early on had an agent in<br />
England that we could take subscriptions.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A housewife who kept her back issues in her spare bathroom.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we still know her. Hazel Greaves, Hazy. Anyway, so we were<br />
getting enough subscriptions from England. We were sending over, I<br />
don't know how they packaged them up, but they call them Mbags, M-<br />
bags, mail bags basically of magazines, then we mail them from<br />
England. So I had more of our connection with British market than<br />
probably any of the other magazines, we definitely did.<br />
And so I get to know Clarkson Clair and what's going on over there.<br />
And then when they bring over the computer to this country and<br />
Timex, my God, big outfit. They were going to market it. By that<br />
time you know, there was no point starting a [inaudible 01:02:25]<br />
magazine or an entire magazine. They were, Or Apple, they were<br />
already existed. So maybe this is going to be the next big one. We<br />
will be right there when they start and we were.<br />
<br />
Timex actually put, what we had simple, simple sink or something<br />
but it was in the package with the computer. So that was one way of<br />
getting our subscriber base and we couldn't possibly afford to<br />
advertise and do direct mailings for magazine like that. But they<br />
were in essence helping us go on. So that's why it is pretty<br />
successful actually. Often, we were making money on the magazine<br />
mainly because we didn't have to promote it.<br />
<br />
If we had to get subscriptions, we could not have possibly made it<br />
work. There wasn't enough advertising really. I don't know what the<br />
issue here was, but it was not as good as we would have liked it.<br />
The magazine would have been tiny if we maintained the same<br />
advertising to edit ratio we would have liked. But we didn't lose<br />
money out of it but we didn't make anything out of it either. I<br />
think it was a breakeven proposition.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Microsystems. [inaudible 01:04:09] .<br />
<br />
David: I said there was a lot of early development in New Jersey and there<br />
was a guy named Saul Libes, you will find him probably, [laughs]<br />
who was the first president of the Amature Computer Group in New<br />
Jersey. He was a Professor at [inaudible 01:04:43] College and he<br />
felt that Byte magazine started out fine but then they were<br />
focusing more on assembled hardware and things that were already<br />
made.<br />
So he wanted to get down on really lower level of do it yourself,<br />
build it yourself. Microsystems was more like Byte was in the very<br />
beginning, focusing on circuit diagram, this was logic in PC's and<br />
everything.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There first name was S100, Microsystems<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, S100 perhaps then it became Microsystems in '78 or '79. When<br />
some of the others came out they started [inaudible 01:05:45] 6800<br />
and 68,000 chips from Motorola. But I would say it was a really<br />
techy magazine and it was one that I think probably killed that one<br />
off.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was dead before [inaudible 01:06:05] . [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: It might have been. I don't know, but it was...<br />
<br />
Betsy: S100 bus did not survive and to the [inaudible 01:06:12] .<br />
<br />
David: It was dead before as there was these eras and the do it yourself<br />
S100 era,that was '75 to '78. Then it kind of had a downward spiral<br />
of two or three years and it was gone. Well, maybe it wasn't gone<br />
but it wasn't the same. And so Microsystems was tuned into that and<br />
they were running hardcore stuff.<br />
And the reason that Saul...we reach an agreement with him to<br />
publish it, is basically he didn't have any real magazine<br />
background. We thought we could do something with it. It turned out<br />
not to be a good fit bit we published it for a while. I don't know<br />
if we made money or lost money on that. Probably it didn't make<br />
anything. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Small business computers or computing.<br />
<br />
David: What?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Small business computers? Who do we buy that from? I can't even<br />
remember. You can't even remember that we had it, I can tell by the<br />
look on your face<br />
<br />
David: I can<br />
<br />
Betsy: That one of my brothers...my brother was a publisher remember?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I don't know who or where we got it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That just fall into grave or...?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Eventually, but that we post it for a while. I think is something<br />
that somebody basically left on our door step.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think it was kind of like a puppy on the... [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: I think it came with your brother.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, because my brother wasn't into publishing until after clearing<br />
college.<br />
<br />
David: It sounded like a good idea at the time.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think we saw a future in business computing<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we did and unfortunately that was one word as if they just<br />
want...I mentioned yesterday that they wanted to really shift the<br />
focus of Creative Computing away from home and broaden out and<br />
shifted into the small business market. And just did not, it was an<br />
uncomfortable fit. We would've been better to have a separate<br />
magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember where we got Small Business Computing from or<br />
where it went.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know, either.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But I know that obviously it wasn't a huge acquisition.<br />
<br />
David: It was a footnote.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A footnote in the story. [laughs]<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Actually, a bigger acquisition was earlier and that was ROM<br />
Magazine. Rom was published by who? (ED: not the Atari-related<br />
magazine of the early 1980s.)<br />
<br />
Betsy: Erik Sandberg-Diment.<br />
<br />
David: Right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: D-I-M-E-N-T.<br />
<br />
David: Connecticut. He did a nice job with the magazine, very nice job<br />
with it. Published nine issues and a little different focus than<br />
Creative but it really overlapped us very nicely. He had more<br />
graphic stuff. In fact, it was through him that I got to know<br />
George Baker and some of the people up there. The other guy that<br />
did the pixelated blocks photos. You've seen those.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The Einstein.<br />
<br />
David: [crosstalk] The Lincoln with block pics.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Block pics.<br />
<br />
David: Block pics. OK, he and George Baker sort of came as a package with<br />
Rom, they knew of each other. We actually, I would say, four or<br />
five issues, ran Rom as a whole separate section and even set it on<br />
the cover of Creative Computing and Rom. Then it became evident...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think that was because he had a whole other editorial kicking<br />
around. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We bought.<br />
<br />
David: Could be. And then we would just merge it in completely, but that<br />
was a very good fit. It brought us more editorial than it did<br />
subscribers. They did not have a big subscriber base, but it was a<br />
nice marriage in a sense.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Video and Arcade Games only published I think four issues.<br />
<br />
David: Three.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Three?<br />
<br />
David: Actually, three but if you've got a hold of the third one, you're<br />
doing well. I think Ziff cut that off after two real issues got<br />
mailed out. We did a third one but it wasn't sent out to<br />
subscribers.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My website only has two issues.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. There were only two that really were distributed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So I have...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: A goal. [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, if you can get a hold of the third one. [laughter] I don't<br />
even have that. There's a same thing on Atarian. There were three<br />
issues of Atarian that I did not keep the third issue. Oh, man.<br />
Shoot me.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: But Video and Arcade Games, there were at least five or six other<br />
magazines focusing on that. Talk about magazines that were running<br />
non-objective manufacture-provided reviews, all the others were. I,<br />
maybe, convinced myself and some people at Davis that there was a<br />
need for really objective...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ziff? Did Ziff do that?<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Were we with Ziff when we did that?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah. That was a late one. So we said, let's...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Continue it through.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, that was definitely. Let's do it. But again...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not only that but it was going to be fun.<br />
<br />
David: It was going to be a lot of fun. [laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: So why did it fail?<br />
<br />
David: OK, again you got to look at the eras and what was happening.<br />
Arcade games then really were on the decline. Video arcades where<br />
you go in and pop a quarter in, because there was so much more<br />
capability in the home computers and the [inaudible 01:12:55] and<br />
the Mattel and the different home systems. They could do all now,<br />
not as much, but you get a pretty darned good game that you could<br />
take home with you and not have to pop a quarter in the slot every<br />
time you play.<br />
So arcade games were kind of on the downward spiral, so that<br />
eliminated a lot of potential advertising. We weren't going to get<br />
any advertising from Nameco and all of the producers of the arcade<br />
games, which was, "Hey, it is advertising along with..." And the<br />
other home producers of the game, there were four or five magazines<br />
already that they were pouring money into. They didn't really want<br />
another one.<br />
<br />
So it was advertising that or just lack of advertising that killed<br />
that off. We just couldn't get it. I think there was still a need<br />
for what we had sort of in a sense proposed to do of objectively<br />
reviewing games and secondly, we're telling people how to play<br />
them.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, it was strategies.<br />
<br />
David: Strategies. It was advertising that we just didn't have, couldn't<br />
get.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:14:28] Atari explored and Atari I think we've covered<br />
pretty well.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Military vehicles, which we talked about.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] Yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So the other magazines, Byte and [inaudible 01:14:45] , was it<br />
rivalry? Was it friendly competition?<br />
<br />
David: Byte, we were in bed together. Not in bed together, but we<br />
published the best of Byte. Creative Computing did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: For awhile.<br />
<br />
David: Well, just one.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. That wasn't that friendly a rivalry. It wasn't that friendly<br />
after awhile.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't friendly once they sold to McGraw Hill, and they sold<br />
early. Then everything was off. We did some joint promotions with<br />
Byte for hardware creative software. We ran the ads for each other<br />
for a short time.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's when McGraw Hill cutoff.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] In a heartbeat. No more of that.<br />
<br />
David: We felt that basically we weren't even competing for the same<br />
advertisers. Just a few, but not really. Certainly, we were not in<br />
direct competition at all with Byte. So that was just kind of all<br />
in the same place and you're going in a hardware direction, we're<br />
going on the software.<br />
When Wayne Green threw this intrigue with his wife and everything<br />
else, lost Byte Magazine. He was fit to be tied. "I'm going to kill<br />
them!" and he started Kilobyte. It wasn't killable. It was Kilobyte<br />
for I don't know how many issues.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not many.<br />
<br />
David: 1000 bytes. [laughter] and a kilobyte, it had a dual meaning there.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: That was a ferocious and very nasty. Oh, horrible rivalry. Somebody<br />
early on forced him not to use the name byte at all.<br />
<br />
Betsy: So it was byte.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: So they changed it to Kilobaud.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Which didn't mean anything.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: No.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So did you have a relationship with Wayne?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Nobody had a relationship with... [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Nobody really had a relationship. I knew him, of course. He was<br />
going his own way. Now the one area actually where we got into more<br />
competition with him than in the magazine itself, because again, he<br />
was trying to be like Byte, hardware oriented and he published 73<br />
magazines so he was basically focusing on the ham radio people, the<br />
do it yourselfers and so on. But they started a software division.<br />
It was pretty good. They had a lot of the same types of software<br />
that we did on cassette tape.<br />
In any event, we really had more of a head to head rivalry on the<br />
software than in the magazine publishing. We never really had<br />
anything to do with the magazine products or books. They also<br />
published some books but more like the magazine hardware type of<br />
thing. We weren't quite as selective, but our book publishing we<br />
did get into things that weren't in the magazine. We published<br />
books with more of a hardware orientation. We had a little broader<br />
line of books than the type of things that we had in the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I don't know if you want to open this can of worms, but you said to<br />
me in an email, "You couldn't find two people whose vision,<br />
philosophy, ethics, and view of business and life was further apart<br />
than Wayne and I." Can you elaborate on that? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was just basically unpleasant, is my take on him. I didn't know<br />
him that well but it was just sort of like he had a chip on his<br />
shoulder and was daring you to knock it off. Wouldn't you say?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You knew him before I did but by the time I arrived on the scene<br />
that was just sort of the general industry perception of him, I<br />
think. It was just stay away from him, leave him alone, he's not<br />
very nice.<br />
<br />
David: Well, one other thing, which we sort of touched on a couple of<br />
times, I'm very trusting. [laughter] Overly so, according to my ex-<br />
wife and I think there would be a couple of examples. Wayne would<br />
walk out of that door, boy, out of sight, 'you're going to do<br />
something to screw him' is what his view would be. He did not trust<br />
anybody.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] And least of all, his ex wife.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: It's the old saying, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean<br />
that somebody isn't out to get you." He thought everyone was out to<br />
get him, everybody. So we were totally philosophically different.<br />
Our ways of doing business were different. I shake hands with you,<br />
we have an agreement. You don't shake hands with Wayne.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't think his employees were ever happy either.<br />
<br />
David: Oh!<br />
<br />
Betsy: You talked to them and it shows. He didn't have like a great...<br />
<br />
David: Rapport.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well it was not. The culture of his organization I don't think was<br />
particularly, I think it was probably permeated with this lack of<br />
trust.<br />
<br />
David: Well, one thing, we had fun. We really did have fun at Creative<br />
Computing. Perhaps some of the editorial staff, too much. There was<br />
one point where Betsy had to away their...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well they were all young guys. Some of them even still in high<br />
school, they would play games for hours and hours and hours, long<br />
after the reviews were done. It was one, self-contained thing that<br />
played football, and they played it for hours. I had to take it<br />
away from them. Like "don't make me be your mother"<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there any drug culture at all? If you read [inaudible 01:22:17]<br />
and he was cocaine and high everyday and popped...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not that we knew of. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: The East coast was quite different.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No there was nothing, really. I don't think so. In fact, my client<br />
John Anderson and Peter Fee, they were actually kind of protective<br />
of me in a lot of ways. I can remember being in John's office and<br />
they were talking about a movie or something like that. John said,<br />
"No, you wouldn't like this movie, don't go to this movie." That<br />
kind of thing, they were funny guys. They just kept laughing. David<br />
Lubar. They were free spirits but they were very funny, talented<br />
guys.<br />
<br />
David: He is coming out with a line of children's books, weird, weird<br />
stuff. The last one, something about the lawn mower weenies. He has<br />
a line of 6 or 8, and they're all little short stories. Some of<br />
them were adaptations of stuff that almost got published in<br />
Creative Computing, probably some of them did. Lubar is a funny<br />
guy. When he left and went to work for one of the video gaming<br />
companies, his first big successful game was "Worm Wars." You were<br />
like, "Worm Wars?" [laughs]<br />
Other people are fighting real serious warrior and you are fighting<br />
with worms. We just had a different kind of culture, a lot of fun.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Jonny Anderson went to work for A+ in San Francisco. He was one<br />
of the five people killed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1986.<br />
He was in a car and a piece of the building fell on the car. He was<br />
a really funny guy.<br />
<br />
David: We did not have a serious business culture.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, we had this great big room with a bunch of tables set up around<br />
the edges, in the middle. It was kind of like that, nowhere near as<br />
neat.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I will clean that up for you.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] Just tangles of wires, and we had to have one of every<br />
kind of computer so we can test all the software, and this one<br />
would be running this kind of peripheral, and it was like a young<br />
guys dream job.<br />
<br />
David: You commented yesterday about how we had a bunch of high school,<br />
not quite, but still...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I said that they were in their early 20s but they basically had the<br />
maturity of high school students, they needed a little bit of<br />
mothering. But I wasn't that myself. They were just really nice<br />
guys, we did a good job hiring those kids.<br />
<br />
David: When you talk about the Atari cultures and some of the others,<br />
where every Friday some of these companies have parties, that kind<br />
of thing. We had an annual party, a picnic. We didn't need weekly<br />
parties and stuff to let you have fun because that stuff was going<br />
on every day, not really partying but playing the games and<br />
bantering and everything else.<br />
As they say, at Washington, a real efficient business culture.<br />
Heck, I didn't work for Digital Equipment, which was still a pretty<br />
relaxed place, but AT&T which was anything but. This is as far away<br />
from that kind of corporate culture as you can get, but it worked.<br />
Didn't make a lot of money, but it worked.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:26:58]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. And I think they appreciated it because they weren't making<br />
tons of money either, but they were having a lot of fun. They<br />
enjoyed going to work, they really enjoyed it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Speaking of Kindle, I've done it but haven't told anybody yet that<br />
best of Creative Computing too is now available on Kindle. And I<br />
have been working backwards. [crosstalk] I just had it on sale.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I haven't publicized it yet for sale.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They won't let you do. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah, I think they will have two.<br />
<br />
David: Did you do that through Amazon? How do you convert is to Kindle?<br />
I scan them and then I do CRM and I use Elance or utilize some<br />
service in India that converts it back to ASCII, and then they<br />
convert it into an E-book from there. It's a lot of work, I want it<br />
done well, and I want it to be super awesome. And they just<br />
[inaudible 01:28:40] , like we were talking about before.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Outsourcing and stuff. But I can do it myself but that would take<br />
way too long. So I just try to do the quality control [inaudible<br />
01:28:49] . It's not perfect but better than nothing.<br />
<br />
David: I have reached the point where with my Dodge restoration book, that<br />
yes, many of the borders around the pictures are terrible, they're<br />
hand drawn and so on. But I'm not going to bother to re-do that, I<br />
just want take the book, get it into some sort of machine readable<br />
format, PDF or something. [inaudible 01:29:24] somebody that can...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah, I can get you off with that. We can then figure it out.<br />
<br />
David: I found one extra one that I can cut up.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That will help a lot. [inaudible 01:29:37] . If you want to sell a<br />
PDF of it, that would be up in couple of day. That's easy, but a<br />
searchable Kindle version that takes longer.<br />
<br />
David: I don't want a Kindle version because people want to print out<br />
something that they can...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Take out to the garage<br />
<br />
David: When people slide under the vehicle they have it there, "Oh, OK<br />
this is what I should be looking for."<br />
<br />
Kevin: If you scan it and upload it to Amazon, even create space from<br />
[inaudible 01:30:06] company, then there could actually be another<br />
book, that looks pretty identical to the first one. We will figure<br />
out.<br />
Do you [inaudible 01:30:23] ? But are you familiar with...?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Are there any?<br />
<br />
Kevin: There are but they are very different than Creative.<br />
<br />
David: Somebody out there said, "What did you read today?" The only<br />
magazines that I will occasionally pick up in the computer field<br />
are mostly from England, Internet magazines, well there are<br />
several, which is sort of interesting that the dominant Internet<br />
magazines come from England, but they do.<br />
If I want to do something, and I haven't lately, but I wanted to<br />
get into doing something different or interactive or something with<br />
my website. I'd pick up one of those magazines and kind of have<br />
same kind of thing that Creative used to publish. Here is a code to<br />
do it in Pearl or HTML, whatever.<br />
<br />
I converted all of my website, quite a while ago, to XHTML from old<br />
HTML. I did not like any of the programs that generate web pages,<br />
mainly because...Well, today its probably OK, but I felt that<br />
earlier on, they were very inefficient. You'd have this much code<br />
for something and XHTML would write it in five lines.<br />
<br />
My old-fashioned [inaudible 01:32:23] said, "You know what, the<br />
interpreter or compiler or whatever, has to go through a lot of<br />
that just to pick out what is going to be displayed." My web pages<br />
are very compact and short. They are all XHTML, none of that is<br />
extra [inaudible 01:32:41] style pages and everything else.<br />
<br />
Anyway, so that's what I'll pick up a magazine for. I'm was doing a<br />
little bit of programming in Pearl and then I said, "No. You know<br />
what, I can get routines that I can download and I don't have to<br />
learn it myself. I learned enough to know that I don't want your<br />
Pearl program." [laughs] Or what is the other one? I don't know.<br />
I'm right at the point now where I'm wanting to do some more things<br />
that I can't, so I'll probably purchase some more computer<br />
magazines and learn about it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Has anyone talked to you about the purchase of PC by Davis?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is a big story.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: She was involved.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was involved. There was a magazine called PC. I was in San<br />
Francisco.<br />
<br />
Kevin: PC magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: PC Magazine, right. And, there was a guy named Tony Gold and there<br />
was somebody else that I can't remember. There was Tony Gold and<br />
this Mr. X started this magazine and they hired...David Banell will<br />
probably tell you all, I don't know all the details but I'm sure he<br />
has it engraved in his brain.<br />
They hired David Banell to run it and I guess several other people,<br />
and my understanding is, that they told them they were going to<br />
give them a piece of the action, they weren't going to pay them<br />
very much but you're all part owners and everything, but nobody<br />
ever wrote it down.<br />
<br />
So when Ziff Davis approached Tony Gold and Mr. X and wanted to buy<br />
the magazine, and the guys said, "Oh yeah, sure," and they sold it<br />
to him and all these people that were working for them said, "Well,<br />
what about us. We're part owners too." But there was no proof of<br />
it. So Ziff bought it, and they were right in the middle, just<br />
about to go to press with an issue and they got word that it had<br />
been purchased by Ziff.<br />
<br />
So David Banell took just about the entire staff and they walked<br />
out and went across town and started PC World. Apparently their<br />
lawyers said, "Don't take anything with you." So they just walked<br />
out and left the offices as they were, and Ziff, who now had a<br />
magazine to get out and no one to do it, sent me out to San<br />
Francisco for a couple of weeks and there was like an editorial<br />
assistant and a couple of freelance writers, were the only people<br />
left.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So this is when you became the interim.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is how I become the editorial director of PC. So I basically<br />
went out there and walked into this office and had to pull together<br />
their issue and get it off to the printer. They had a big dummy on<br />
the wall where everthing...<br />
<br />
Kevin: They lay all the...<br />
<br />
Betsy: They lay all the impositions where all the pages and the stories<br />
were going to go and they moved everything around. [laughs] But<br />
they couldn't resist.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That is awesome.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This one guy, whose name I wish I could remember. Barry Owen,<br />
worked with me, and we were able to get it off to the printer and<br />
then pack everything up and send it back to New York and then they<br />
hired Barry Owen, he moved to New York and he eventually become the<br />
editor, because that was who they had.<br />
I was sort of the editorial director for a while and they said<br />
that, "If you were going to do this, you would have to come to the<br />
city. We are going to really set up an office here and make it<br />
real." And I said, "No, I am not going to drive into the city every<br />
day or take the train or the bus or anything." It was a interesting<br />
story and we were getting much more interesting version of it from<br />
David Barnell, who was there. [laughs]<br />
<br />
And in the mean time, they were all starting up PC World and taking<br />
all of their freelancers and trying to make it as difficult as<br />
possible for PC. That was a big rivalry, obviously.<br />
<br />
David: And then it created a couple of months of problems at creative too,<br />
because my editor was gone. I had really gotten very dependent to<br />
rely on her for so many things. "I got to edit this myself." And<br />
then the whole question mark was, OK if PC magazine, is she can<br />
stay with it. It was a time of uncertainty.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm sure it was a bad career move.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. But PC magazine still exist.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, exactly. I don't know if I would have existed if I had to<br />
commute to New York, that's a nasty commute. Millions of people do<br />
it but, I just didn't want to be one of them. I didn't mean to<br />
interrupt, so back to you.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What are you most proud of, or everything you have done?<br />
<br />
David: OK, that's obviously not a one word answer. Proud is, I am not<br />
crazy about it. I guess the fact that I continued to hear from<br />
people that said, "Hey, I got my start in computing from Basic<br />
computer games or Creative Computing," or something that I had my<br />
hand in, that makes me feel pretty good.<br />
You have a long term, or longer term influence that just what you<br />
do at the time, it's living on. It's not living on forever. Basic<br />
isn't going to live on forever. But I think the idea that having<br />
some positive influence on other people, on their lives, on their<br />
careers, that's a good.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You helped send people into the computer science field.<br />
<br />
David: And you know the specific individual accomplishments. Yeah, I wrote<br />
a couple of programs that are probably in some cases, maybe not the<br />
program but the routines, are still in use. That's minor compared<br />
to having an influence on people and their career and their<br />
outlook, their future. That's way more important. "OK so I wrote a<br />
great algorithm, so what."<br />
<br />
Kevin: And you really think it's the same algorithm that's being used in<br />
Google maps and...<br />
<br />
David: Portions of it, yeah. But that is minor. I look back and I say,<br />
"Almost anything that I wrote in the last 30-40 years, if I were<br />
doing it today, I would have done it a little differently, but I<br />
didn't know then what I know now." So there's no one thing I could<br />
say, "Oh, that was a really great article, or great insight," or<br />
something. Anything can be improved upon.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sure. That's what disappoints me about computer magazines today is<br />
I don't think that it seems like children going to be able to go.<br />
It's not going to motivate anybody to do anything, other than use<br />
Word version 18 or whatever. There's no Basic programs to type<br />
anymore and it's not exciting.<br />
[cross talk]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Well, [inaudible 01:42:31] was mentioning that at breakfast,<br />
oh gosh that was just yesterday.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was yesterday [laughs] .<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] That kids today don't have any feeling about, or I should<br />
say knowledge about the real basics of bits. What is a bit?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: Nobody knows anymore. He wanted to find some little simple piece of<br />
hardware. Really, I guess he has, that every kid when they're in<br />
the 5th or 6th grade will be exposed to this so they'll have some<br />
concept of what bits are all about. Are you ever going to get that<br />
into schools today? No. So anyway, it's just kind of, hopefully<br />
there's been some long term influence.<br />
And what I'm doing now even, which is mainly developing bible<br />
studies for...well, I mostly have guys that have had a drug or<br />
alcohol addiction problem coming to this. They're in a rescue<br />
mission. I'm hoping that these studies can have a little bit of an<br />
influence on the direction of their lives. They're a positive<br />
influence on where they go from here. So it's kind of, people more<br />
than a specific thing or whatever.<br />
<br />
[pause]<br />
<br />
Those are terrible copies.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They are copies. These are from the scans. I was printing scans and<br />
I wasn't trying to make them pretty. Just for my reasons, it was<br />
quick and dirty. I could've bumped the contrast and stuff.<br />
<br />
David: There's Carl.<br />
[pause]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do have anything left, like how many subscribers you had over time?<br />
Is that data around anymore? How many newsstand copies you had? I<br />
assume that is a lot.<br />
<br />
David: OK, maximum, I think we mentioned that. We hit just about a half a<br />
million before Ziff killed it. Then, they gave people a choice of<br />
three magazines that they expected to continue to publish, PC,<br />
Apple's A+, or Mac User.<br />
I'm guessing that most people went with PC. One of the reasons<br />
actually was Ziff's rationale at that point was, PC World had<br />
really grown a lot and the circulation base of PC World and PC were<br />
very close. They were both about a half million. PC might have had<br />
a small lead.<br />
<br />
Then, by killing Creative Computing and rolling all of those<br />
subscribers, there was some overlap. Certainly, there were some<br />
subscribers that got both magazines. You probably had a quarter of<br />
a million additional subscribers into PC. All of the sudden, they<br />
go to advertise, "We've got three-quarters of a million and PC<br />
World only has half a million."<br />
<br />
That was when PC had a huge growth spurt. You know, they started<br />
publishing those telephone-book-thick issues.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I would think that it probably still holds the record for the<br />
largest magazine ever published, whenever the issue was that they<br />
published it, it was their biggest one. Certainly magazines aren't<br />
getting bigger now. They didn't continue to increase in size after<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: Then they started publishing it twice a month. The nudge that the<br />
subscriber base at Creative, gave to PC really, separated them<br />
completely from PC World. They had their reasons.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. This is a chart of the page count of Creative Computing over<br />
its life. It's not a question, I just made a chart. Every December<br />
there's a peak for the big December issue. Right at the end it<br />
just, all of the sudden, stopped.<br />
<br />
David: Well, that's when Ziff had decided to kill it, which was almost a<br />
year before. They basically let us publish for another eight or<br />
nine months after they had made the decision.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was a lot of back and forth. Are they going to kill it? Are<br />
they not going to kill it?<br />
<br />
David: They weren't promoting, no subscription promotion. They were saving<br />
their money. If you don't promote the subscriptions, you're not<br />
going to get them.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is page count.<br />
<br />
David: It was advertising.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:48:59]<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't actually subscriber base didn't drop them. That's cool.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just thought I'd do a comparison, even though that's not really<br />
what I'm doing here. In the beginning, you guys were bimonthly and<br />
they were monthly. I couldn't know how to do it accurately. Their<br />
page count's actually higher, because they were doing twice as<br />
much. I don't have all the data here. You guys tended to publish<br />
larger issues than "Kilobyte?"<br />
<br />
David: It was so dependent upon advertising. You got some magazines, they<br />
would run 80, 90 percent advertising, if they could. In some<br />
special interest fields, you can get away with that, because people<br />
are actually buying the magazine for the advertising, not for the<br />
editorial content.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [inaudible 01:50:02] , a good example.<br />
<br />
David: That's exactly right. Even what the guys that bought Military<br />
Vehicles, they just went over so heavily to...I always believe that<br />
you should have at least one-third editorial content, preferably<br />
more. They dropped down to 20 percent to edit.<br />
<br />
Kevin: There was one issue, the 10th anniversary issue, I don't mean to be<br />
picking on Wayne here. There was this quote he happened to say,<br />
which I thought was really interesting to me, I wanted to get your<br />
take on it. He said, this is in 1984, "A computer system doesn't<br />
really stand a prayer anymore unless there's at least one<br />
dedicated, independent magazine for its users."<br />
<br />
David: Wayne said that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wayne said that. Is that true? At the time, would you have agreed<br />
with that?<br />
<br />
David: In '84? Again, you've got to look at where we were in the cycle at<br />
that point. The cycle was then, there were more computers dying off<br />
than there were new ones being released. Standardization had come<br />
in really. You've got the IBM PC, and everybody's producing a PC<br />
clone. Apple kept going, and Atari, and Commodore attempted to.<br />
If you were to start a computer company at that point, with a new<br />
computer, yeah, you'd need something to give your user base<br />
something to do with it, more than just what the manufacturer was<br />
selling. So, that's probably accurate. What do you think?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, I think it's accurate. That's what people started to expect.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. Another chord of the same issue which we've kind of touched<br />
on from Tom Dwyer. This is in 1984. He's saying, "Computer<br />
magazines used to have personality [laughter] and now they don't."<br />
Now, they really don't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They really don't!<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think they still have personality in form but now it's just<br />
inconsistent.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Who was Tom Dwyer? I don't remember him.<br />
<br />
David: Tom Dwyer? He was at University of Pittsburgh. He came up with all<br />
those neat applications. He and Margo...He had the best basic<br />
primer of anybody, in fact the only one that both Kemeny and Kurtz<br />
endorsed outside of their own material. He had really written some<br />
good Basic books.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm just finishing up here. The Internet says you were born in<br />
1939. Is that right?<br />
<br />
David: Yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Where were you born?<br />
<br />
David: New York, New York.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent.<br />
<br />
David: I was born in the hospital that my father had a hand in designing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Really?<br />
<br />
David: He was an architect up until the Recession. I think he, perhaps,<br />
designed the restrooms but he wasn't the...<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: When were you two married?<br />
<br />
Betsy: 1988. 25 years ago.<br />
<br />
David: June 18, 1988.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What's your last name now?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mine?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ahl.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I tried keeping this professional thing and it was just way too<br />
confusing, since that really wasn't my name anyway. That was my<br />
first husband's name, and then just...this is way too complicated.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My wife kept her maiden name and now she wishes she hadn't. It's<br />
just confusing. It just made sense to do.<br />
<br />
Betsy: If had been my maiden name, I might have, but it really wasn't.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What haven't I asked you that I should have?<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] We kind of were noodling it around last night and said,<br />
"Man, the guy's thorough."<br />
<br />
Betsy: You the most prepared interviewer ever.<br />
<br />
David: I jotted down a couple of notes. Nope.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Got everything?<br />
<br />
David: What's your thinking? Because originally you were talking to me<br />
about covering Wayne's magazines and so on.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My original thought, when I had put no thought into it, was that it<br />
would be half about Wayne's magazine and half about Creative. First<br />
of all, after talking to him, I thought there's not enough to do<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: Did you talk to Wayne?<br />
<br />
Kevin: I talked to Wayne.<br />
<br />
David: Well that's good to know, right? Carl Helmers didn't know if Wayne<br />
was still alive.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He's still alive.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's true. We asked Carl Helmers if Wayne was still alive and he<br />
was [inaudible 01:56:06] .<br />
<br />
David: Actually, there was another guy up there that published a computer<br />
magazine. What the heck was the name of it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Who are you talking about?<br />
<br />
David: Up in New Hampshire, Peterborough. It was one of the earlier would-<br />
be competitors to Datamation. So, it was much earlier.<br />
He was absolutely totally convinced about the Kennedy assassination<br />
and published a computer analysis of all the photos and everything<br />
else. Every single issue of the magazine had this stuff. He and<br />
Wayne were on the same wavelength on that. You ask Wayne about the<br />
conspiracy. [laughs] You'll get an earful.<br />
<br />
Kevin: In answer to your question. First, it was going to be the two, and<br />
then that happened. Also my wife said, "If you're doing two, then<br />
it's going to seem like a compare and contrast thing." That's not<br />
what I want to do.<br />
Now I'm thinking that this will be a project about the earliest<br />
computer magazines, the first computer magazines. That way, I can,<br />
whatever, four or five chapters. One on Creative, and maybe Byte.<br />
I'm meeting with the editor of Byte in a couple of weeks at an<br />
event, maybe Interface Age or one of the other ones.<br />
<br />
David: If you can find Bob Jones, that would be an interesting contrast.<br />
He was Interface Age. He had a different perspective on a lot of<br />
things, and I had a lot of respect for him. He just didn't sell at<br />
the right time. Too bad. Bob Jones was a very serious, good guy.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Who were the other early people? Dr. Dobbs? I don't know what...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, Dr. Dobbs...<br />
<br />
David: Jim Warren! Oh my goodness. That would give you another perspective<br />
altogether.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's, again, the California...<br />
<br />
David: Jim Warren and Bob Albrecht are tied together very closely. They're<br />
both in sort of in the alternative lifestyle. I don't know what<br />
you'd call it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That probably had Friday afternoon pot parties. [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Oh, boy. Did they ever! Yes, yes. Jim also was the one that started<br />
the West Coast computer fairs. He's a very capable guy. Dr. Dobb's<br />
journal was in a sense, well, you've probably seen it. You have,<br />
right? OK, so you know.<br />
That's really low level programming rather than higher languages.<br />
We're talking about machine languages, assembly language,<br />
programming, and there. It was sort of like Microsystems was to<br />
Byte. Microsystems, for the really serious hardware guy. Dr. Dobbs<br />
was for the really serious programmer, compared to Creative which<br />
was for people who just wanted to type something in that would<br />
work.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:59:35] basic right. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Dr. Dobbs. That was a totally different [inaudible 01:59:43]<br />
competitor.<br />
<br />
David: We didn't compete at all. I had a view that we competed at all with<br />
them; they may have thought we did but I didn't think so.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did they even have advertising?<br />
<br />
David: Oh yeah, actually they did, and it kept going for a long time<br />
because it was a small little nitch magazine. But, yeah, Jim Warren<br />
would be an interesting guy, very interesting guy early on. I don't<br />
know about Albert because you say he published more tabloid<br />
newspapers. I don't know if they ever really published any magazine<br />
size thing or not. Probably not, but it would give me a totally<br />
different perspective because they are coming from the west coast,<br />
looser or whatever.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That sounded pretty loose.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah nothing compared to that.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think he was sort of in rebellion when he started working at<br />
Creative Computing because he was coming off of AT&T where he had to<br />
wear a suit to work every day. So the first thing he did was burn<br />
his suits and wear t-shirt and jeans way before anybody was doing<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: I went extremely in the other direction, yeah I did, but who else<br />
real early. Personal computing which I think David Barnell somehow<br />
involved in it at some point in there. Because they moved from the<br />
west coast to New Jersey, they were bought by...who was that? It<br />
was mostly a company that published things like hardware age and<br />
advertiser-driven magazines. What was the name?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, gosh. Begins with an 'H'.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Halshep<br />
<br />
David: No. Anyway, when they brought personal computing...I think Barnell<br />
maybe even started it, and then they moved it to New Jersey, and<br />
then David said "I'm not going to New Jersey. I'm a west coast<br />
guy," or whatever. And then, they changed the whole thing totally.<br />
That's why I said they're one of the ones where they were so<br />
totally advertiser driven. A press release is a product review, as<br />
far as they were concerned.<br />
They had some interesting stuff. They were a competitor only in<br />
name, but also because they got the advertising. "I think I'm going<br />
to advertise." "Oh! We're going to publish a wonderful review! Give<br />
it to us." And so they were early, and they made money. There were<br />
a bunch of flash-in-the-pan magazines that lasted 2 or 3 or maybe 6<br />
issues, but nobody...<br />
<br />
Kevin: But only one in seven made it, so...<br />
<br />
Betsy: One in seven, right?<br />
<br />
David: That's right, exactly. I can't remember the name of some of these<br />
ones, but there was a very successful big magazine that published<br />
all Apple...reviews of Apple stuff. What was that one? Apple by<br />
themselves spawned I'd guess half a dozen magazines.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Inquest, and Insider, and Apple...a bunch of others there.<br />
<br />
David: Right. Actually, there's one that I can't think of the name of, it<br />
turned out, it was bigger and thicker and creative. They were<br />
publishing a lot of stuff, but again, it would all be positive and<br />
so they really killed us on getting advertising. We had been a<br />
publisher of Apple material for a while. Then all these others came<br />
along. That one, whatever it was, was really took a lot of<br />
advertising from us. I'll think about it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You'll remember.<br />
<br />
David: I'll remember some of this. When it all settled out, you came back<br />
down to eight or nine, but the ones we're talking about...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Well, at one point there was 200.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I think that's correct.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You are probably counting newsletters..<br />
<br />
Kevin: Probably industry-specific stuff and niche stuff but still, you<br />
went from one to 200, 10 years ago.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. That's true.</div>Mauryhttps://www.computingpioneers.com/index.php?title=Dave_Ahl_and_Betsy_Ahl&diff=147Dave Ahl and Betsy Ahl2019-09-25T18:39:07Z<p>Maury: assuming "dark issues" is really "back issues"</p>
<hr />
<div>This is a transcript of an audio interview. This transcript may contain errors - if you're using this material for research, etc. please verify with the original recorded interview.<br />
<br />
Source: ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast<br />
<br />
Source URL: http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-280-david-and-betsy-ahl-creative-computing-magazine<br />
<br />
Interviewer: Kevin Savetz<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm interested in how you guys got together. Was it some sort of<br />
office romance? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It started before then. I was working at Drew University and I was<br />
dating the computer science professor. He invited Dave...he was a<br />
subscriber to Creative Computing. I can remember being at his house<br />
and picking up a copy of this magazine and thinking, "Creative<br />
Computing," and laughing. "What kind of a title is that?"<br />
He invited Dave to come speak to one of his classes. While he was<br />
there, he said, "I should stop by your placement office. We're<br />
starting to expand. I'm looking for some people." Right? Am I<br />
getting this right? I was looking for other opportunities, so I<br />
sent him my resume. Many months later, he hired me.<br />
<br />
David: She still smarts about that.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: I interviewed her in, I don't know, April or so.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You interviewed me on April 17th and you did not hire me until<br />
August 1st. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: A lot was going on that year. That was '78.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was a really long time after that that we got married. We didn't<br />
get married until 10 years later.<br />
<br />
David: Actually, I had hired Betsy as our business manager. That's what I<br />
really needed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Not a wife, then.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not wife then, either.<br />
<br />
David: Not at that point. We had 2 buildings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had one.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, well I was looking for...<br />
<br />
Betsy: My first job was to find another building.<br />
<br />
David: We were expanding like crazy. In fact, one of the reasons that I<br />
didn't hire her sooner, I had just left my day job at AT&T, and was<br />
facing up to, "Oh my gosh, can I afford to take a salary out of<br />
Creative Computing?" Yes, we had expanded a lot, but can I even pay<br />
myself, much less other senior people? I left AT&T in July, and<br />
finally by August it became clear I really have to get this<br />
administration end of things under control.<br />
The editorial was OK. I had enough outside contributors that were<br />
going along with what we were doing in-house that I could continue<br />
with that, but it was the other end of things where we really had<br />
some problems. So then we go to 2 separate facilities. One was a 2<br />
family house on the other side of Morristown, and the other was a<br />
converted greenhouse garage, which is where I started. So, Betsy<br />
was in the greenhouse garage where I had the administration side of<br />
things, and I was at the house and that was the editorial and art<br />
and...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Software.<br />
<br />
David: ...putting the magazine together. Software, right. So she would<br />
come over from her place to my office every day or two just to let<br />
me know what's going on, and we'd get together. But it wasn't until<br />
I don't' remember the date when Betsy was saying, "Well, I'd like<br />
to get into..."<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well I had spent all my summers in college and two thereafter<br />
working at our local newspaper, writing editing and putting the<br />
whole thing together, so I think I more or less just said, "We've<br />
got all these new product announcements that we don't have anybody<br />
to do, why don't I just do them?" So, I started out doing the press<br />
releases and things.<br />
<br />
David: Her newspaper experience was first in high school covering sports.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, I started out covering the unpopular sports as a senior in<br />
high school. Because they didn't want a girl to write about the<br />
important sports. So they let the girl write about the unimportant<br />
sports, which turned out to be the winning sports, at this small<br />
New Jersey high school. That's how I started.<br />
<br />
David: And then at the newspaper, you started by writing obituaries,<br />
right?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well, it's one of the things I did. I always wanted to be a Spanish<br />
teacher. I didn't know anything about this. So, I got this sports-<br />
writing job by way of a babysitting job, I babysat for the<br />
publisher's kids and on the way home one night he said to me, "We<br />
always have a boy from the school who writes about the sports for<br />
the paper, do you know anybody?" and I said, "Well, I know the guy<br />
who did it last year, and if he could do it, I could do it."<br />
So I did that and didn't' think much more of it. Went off to<br />
college, came back over spring break, and ran into the guy in the<br />
grocery store and he said, "Would you like a job working for the<br />
paper this summer?" And I said sure. I had no idea whether he<br />
wanted me to sweep the floors or what, but it was a job so I took<br />
it. It was in the editorial department.<br />
<br />
And I learned from some very serious journalists who had worked for<br />
a very good paper, the Newark Evening News, which was a very<br />
serious paper that probably was too serious and folded, probably in<br />
the mid '60s, but these people were really good journalists and<br />
they taught me a lot.<br />
<br />
I think it was that first year, about halfway through the summer<br />
the publisher was on vacation, the editor was going to go on<br />
vacation when the publisher came back and the publisher, the day he<br />
was supposed to come back had appendicitis, had to have an<br />
appendectomy which back in those days was a much bigger deal than<br />
it is now. The editor said, "Well, I'm leaving." [laughs] And there<br />
I was. I was running this little paper.<br />
<br />
David: So I figured if you can run a newspaper, even though it's just a<br />
summer job, she could do a lot for us. Well, Betsy continued to<br />
handle the administrative things for really quite awhile and, as<br />
she said, probably was initially doing new product releases. Cause<br />
you get just tons of it over the transom and from these smaller<br />
companies...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So you'd like get a press release and then you'd rewrite it, that<br />
sort of things?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well we had a new product section and it was a format, a style for<br />
them, for each one. If they sent a photo, do a photo, a cut line<br />
for it. Basically what I do is let them pile up and then sort<br />
through and figure out which ones were worthy of attention. And<br />
then it was kind of just filler. They ran in one column and when<br />
you came to the end of the magazine whatever you had leftover you<br />
would fill in with these.<br />
<br />
David: And the thing is that the companies that were putting out these<br />
press releases, this was back in the, what '76, '77 or so, tiny<br />
little companies. They had no marketing expertise so they were<br />
sending us, in some cases, not quite handwritten but pretty crude.<br />
So it took some editing and some real work to make them readable.<br />
And then, as Betsy said, you had to guess. OK, which one, this is a<br />
significant product but is this guy going to be able to make this<br />
company go or is it just going to flop? And we tried to be<br />
responsible to the readers. Reporting on things that weren't just a<br />
wonderful great new idea but something that they were going to have<br />
on the market that was going to get some support and everything<br />
else. So anyway. That was a long story of how we got together.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I still don't know how you got together.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We were working in an office about as large as this banquette here<br />
together. Because when we first started working together we didn't<br />
have this other house. So it was the two of us. You had an actual<br />
desk I believe. I had a table that he had made out of particle<br />
board. Yeah it was fancy and I had to put duct tape along it<br />
because the edge was making holes in my clothes.<br />
So we worked in this office back to back, sort of got to know each<br />
other, and became friends, little by little. He said to me, when<br />
you're looking for this building, it would be a good thing if there<br />
was a place for me to live because I'm in the process of getting<br />
separated from my wife. Which it turned out you didn't do right<br />
away but eventually you did. Right?<br />
<br />
David: Well, it was three months later. That was right away in a sense.<br />
What precipitated that was we had a woman that was working in the<br />
mailroom and she got in cahoots with somebody in the accounting<br />
department and they started working a little embezzlement.<br />
<br />
Kevin: This was at the [inaudible 00:13:49] ?<br />
<br />
David: Pardon?<br />
<br />
Betsy: At Creative Computing.<br />
<br />
David: No, at Creative Computing. This was just after Betsy was hired. In<br />
fact, they had it going on before and I mean they were very good at<br />
it. What they did is they set up a bank account in the name of<br />
Creative Computing in the next county. And they would take very<br />
fourth or fifth check and it might be a subscription, it might be<br />
paying for an ad or something...<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was mostly the advertisers.<br />
<br />
David: Well it was both. And then they put that into their bank account.<br />
And then the one that was in the accounting department would mark<br />
the thing as paid.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, she didn't. That was her mistake.<br />
<br />
David: Well, she didn't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because that wasn't her job.<br />
<br />
David: Well she blew one. In any event it was my advertising manager that<br />
we had sent an overdue notice to one of the advertisers.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Apple.<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Apple. It was Regis McKenna, it was Apple's agency.<br />
<br />
David: And they said, we paid that. And a woman said, well send me proof.<br />
And they did. And we looked at the bank where it was deposited and<br />
then we called in local detective, police department. And they got<br />
the bank records and said, "How much do you think this was?" Well<br />
no they didn't say that, they said, this is probably a lot more<br />
than you thought.<br />
And it turned out to be well over $100,000. And our total annual,<br />
not even profit at that point...well, the gross was just about a<br />
million at that point, not quite, but close to it. So $100,000 was<br />
a big, big chunk 10 percent.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When was this?<br />
<br />
David: '78. And, so, obviously we fired these two. And then the court<br />
finally, they determined that they had also, one of them had been<br />
involved in welfare fraud and other stuff and the court ordered<br />
them to pay it back at the rate of, I don't know...<br />
<br />
Betsy: 47 cents a week.<br />
<br />
David: It was some tiny amount.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 00:16:26]<br />
[laughter and crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Course they'll never pay anything.<br />
<br />
David: And we got one payment you know, and that was it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And she was ordered to do public service. Like who wants someone<br />
doing public service for them who's done something like that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Magazines back then, probably any business but, they were a hotbed<br />
of intrigue. You had that happened and then the whole Bike Magazine<br />
getting stolen.<br />
<br />
David: So Betsy actually, in response to that brought, in response to the<br />
embezzlement brought in her Sister-in-Law Bobbi, and I think your<br />
mother too...<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Bobbi's mother.<br />
<br />
David: Bobbi's mother, OK. But one to...<br />
<br />
Betsy: My mother in law. I was a widow at the time.<br />
<br />
David: ...do some of the accounting because we didn't have an accountant<br />
and wanted just to help out and make some calls to advertisers and<br />
say can you speed up your payment a little bit and also calls to<br />
people that we owed money to, hey we're going to be maybe a little<br />
late. It really didn't look good. That was just a huge amount of<br />
money and so we had to stretch things out and hope that the growth<br />
continued so we could recover some of this.<br />
Betsy really rescued us there. It was amazing. We finally did<br />
stretch things out. What precipitated the separation with my wife<br />
at the time is I went home and told her this had happened and<br />
everything.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Thanksgiving weekend. Day before Thanksgiving.<br />
<br />
David: The day before Thanksgiving is when we got all the information from<br />
the police department and I went home to my wife and she said, "You<br />
dumb...," well I won't repeat the whole thing but, "You are so<br />
stupid. You trust people." "Yes, I trust people." "You shouldn't<br />
trust people like that. Get out of the house. I can't put up with<br />
this anymore." So it was a good thing we had a two family house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had this two family house.<br />
<br />
David: I moved into the bedroom on one side.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He had his office on one side of the top floor in the back bedroom<br />
and his bedroom in the back bedroom on the other side and his<br />
kitchen. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is this the place I was reading about where your bedroom was above<br />
the kitchen?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yes. The Ted Nelson.<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, a lot of things precipitated. Because of that, we had to<br />
make some other changes on personnel and move some people around. I<br />
think after that then Betsy took more of a role in the editorial<br />
end of things.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Stayed there until the bitter end.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The bitter end. Actually, I was there after he was gone.<br />
<br />
David: That's true.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ziff continued to pay me several months after they closed the<br />
magazine to stay behind and clean up because we have a 75,000<br />
square foot building. Make sure that we don't dispose of the<br />
hardware and just basically get it ready.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When you quit at the phone company to start a magazine, that must<br />
have been scary.<br />
<br />
David: I had left Digital Equipment in 1974, and I'm sure you read the<br />
whole rationale behind that, and joined AT&T in marketing,<br />
educational marketing. Same thing I was doing at DEC but obviously<br />
marketing different products to a different mix of customers. AT&T,<br />
back then and perhaps today, they had a real formula that you're in<br />
a job for two years and then they rotate you out or they put you in<br />
another job.<br />
The way AT&T works is they have certain steps. There's a manager<br />
and then a director level. There are levels, one, two, three, four,<br />
five. The operating companies, like Pacific Bell and so on, have<br />
similar steps that are considered a half step below AT&T. What they<br />
do is they rotate you out to an operating company, a half step<br />
promotion, they rotate you back into AT&T, now you're a full step.<br />
You never get a full step in one company.<br />
<br />
They had offered me a rotation to Southern Bell. Birmingham,<br />
Alabama. "No. No." Then probably two or three months later said<br />
we've got an opening in Wisconsin Tel. "Oh my gosh. Come on,<br />
something sensible." I turned them down, which was bad. You can't<br />
turn down. If you turn down three you might as well retire.<br />
<br />
The third one was, in a sense, it wasn't a promotion but it was a<br />
sideways job jump within AT&T itself. I went from having the<br />
education group, which was about eight people, to corporate<br />
communications, which is about 100 people and a huge budget. I was<br />
responsible for all of the marketing communications for the whole<br />
Bell system. Not advertising.<br />
<br />
We had seminar centers, put out all kinds of educational pamphlets,<br />
even a magazine for our customers on how to use the equipment. I<br />
was doing that. It's a big job. It's a 50 hour a week job. Creative<br />
Computing was halfway down the block. I'd go there at lunch time,<br />
see how things were doing.<br />
<br />
As I said a little bit ago, when it looked like we were going to<br />
hit a million dollars I said I've got to get serious about this.<br />
That's when I resigned from AT&T. That was probably the first, I<br />
shouldn't say the first, but that was a major problem with my wife<br />
at that time. You're leaving AT&T? You're leaving all those<br />
benefits? What are you doing, you idiot? We were on the downward<br />
spiral at that point and then the embezzlement just sealed the<br />
whole thing.<br />
<br />
Leaving any job for an unknown thing like you started a little<br />
company and you leave your day job. You're making a real<br />
commitment.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Even once you were at Creative full time, it looks like you did a<br />
lot of everything. You were writing, you were doing programming,<br />
you were being the editor, the publisher and the editor which is<br />
not done anymore.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. I don't know. You can correct me. I don't think I was a<br />
control freak.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. You had Phil Ellenberg. You had just hired Phil Ellenberg as<br />
the advertising manager. Richie was doing it. Where did he come<br />
from? He came from some respectable place. He came from some<br />
respectable place, Phil Ellenberg.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, he did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was like a real person who had a real job, not like the rest of<br />
us. He was the ad manager. I think once you made the step to leave<br />
AT&T then you mostly concentrated on the editorial. You weren't<br />
selling ads and writing and you had Steve North who was doing a lot<br />
of the editorial.<br />
<br />
David: At the beginning, yeah. The thing is I'd be lying if I said I knew<br />
how things were going to go, I knew this was going to be a huge<br />
magazine some day. I had no clue. When I started Creative Computing<br />
there weren't even personal computers at that point. I was<br />
convinced, I guess, that they would come about. I had no idea that<br />
it would be three months later that the Altair came about. It was<br />
more that I thought that an educational magazine like we had been<br />
publishing at DEC should continue.<br />
DEC had dropped off. They stopped publishing Edu when I left the<br />
education group. Well, they published an issue or two but they<br />
really weren't serious about continuing it. Then you had all of<br />
these people out here in the west coast, the Hewlett Packard<br />
computers. They were publishing some good software, they had some<br />
good arrangements with Minnesota Educational Computers Consortium<br />
and some others to distribute stuff that they developed, but there<br />
was no information source for schools and teachers and kids that<br />
were using computers.<br />
<br />
That's what I envisioned initially, but then once the Altair and<br />
the others came out people buy this kit computer and say what can I<br />
do with it? We've got these programs that will run.<br />
<br />
Betsy: First you have to steal Basic.<br />
<br />
David: What?<br />
<br />
Betsy: First you have to steal Basic.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I noticed that, I don't know what it's called, the public opinion<br />
or I don't know the word, this part here. The number one magazine<br />
of computer applications.<br />
<br />
David: That was a Davis thing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It started off first issue a non-profit magazine of educational and<br />
recreational. That was November 1970. May/June 1975 the words non-<br />
profit disappeared.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He never set it up as a non-profit.<br />
<br />
David: I did not.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You started making a profit.<br />
<br />
David: That's right. [laughs]<br />
Betsy; It was the unintentionally non-profit.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Three years later it quietly changed into the number one magazine<br />
of computer applications and software.<br />
<br />
David: That was when Ziff Davis took over.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Really? No, that was '78.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, that was '78.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, '78.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He stayed until the end.<br />
<br />
David: Right. OK. You're right. Who knows. We changed it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It seemed like a good idea at the time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's clearly a shift from education to education plus other things.<br />
<br />
David: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think it was when he realized that if you really wanted to make a<br />
profit you had to leave education behind because teachers want<br />
everything for free, or they certainly did then.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They have some websites for teachers. They still do. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Schools, teachers, yeah, they want everything for free and they get<br />
a lot for free. Places like Huntington Computer Project. There was<br />
one out here, Oregon. Yes, there was. I think it was based right<br />
here in Portland. It would have been, right, if it was in Oregon?<br />
Yes, there was a computing consortium at that time, Hewlett Packard<br />
oriented.<br />
Then you had People's Computer Company down in California that was<br />
sort of providing stuff to schools. They were mostly into<br />
alternative schools and there were a lot of them in the Bay area at<br />
that time. In fact, there was a magazine or a newspaper, big thing,<br />
I don't know how often it came out, called the "De-school Primer".<br />
<br />
It was for people that...I won't say they were hippies but<br />
basically homeschoolers but they got together and said, "We're<br />
going to educate our kids outside of the public education system<br />
but we don't want to do it individually. We'll get together." There<br />
was a big movement there and they were into computers, unlike the<br />
public schools back in '75, '76.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Homeschooling back then was very avant-garde. It was not approved.<br />
<br />
David: Not like today. The shift away from education. That, of course, was<br />
partially driven by the hardware that was then available to people<br />
at home.<br />
When I first started the magazine, I had four editors over the<br />
years, five I guess, but Steve Gray had been publishing a<br />
newsletter, what he called the "Amateur Computer Group Newsletter".<br />
It was for engineers who were scavenging up old parts from<br />
Honeywell and IBM and GE and DEC and trying to put together a<br />
computer. You've got success stories and here's how you can make<br />
this worth together.<br />
<br />
That was a long way away from an Altair, but that's what I was<br />
focusing on, people that were doing that and education. Changed our<br />
focus. You're right. Good observation.<br />
<br />
Kevin: After that, do you feel the focus changed in the next 10 years?<br />
<br />
David: The focus changed largely due to selling the magazine to Ziff<br />
Davis.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When's that?<br />
<br />
David: We were negotiating for a while and I think the sale finally went<br />
through in '83. Yeah, '83. Maybe late '82 but roughly then. They<br />
felt that you need more of a business focus, small business and<br />
people running businesses out of their home. That's where it<br />
started but then we got into real small businesses. I shouldn't say<br />
real but a store front or a small manufacturer, something like<br />
that. That's probably a direction we would not have gone. I<br />
wouldn't have gone on my own.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had a magazine called "Small Business Computing." Remember?<br />
<br />
David: That's right, we did. I would have kept Creative more targeted on<br />
the home market and still education, to some extent, but more on<br />
the home and people that were running a business, a single<br />
entrepreneur. You could review a spreadsheet or a small business<br />
computer or higher end printer or something but not lift it up to<br />
that next level up.<br />
When you're owned by somebody else and they say this is what we<br />
want to do you've got to be responsive to it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Why did you sell? Was it something that had to be done? I've read<br />
the official line.<br />
<br />
David: I think the official line is pretty close to the real line. What<br />
happened is the first magazine, maybe not the very first but the<br />
first sizable magazine, to sell was the Byte and they sold to<br />
McGraw Hill. Then there were three or four other sales. At the time<br />
there were maybe eight special interest publishers in the country.<br />
You had Hurst and CBS magazine and Ziff Davis. Maybe eight serious<br />
ones. There were some others that were, "Oh, it'd be nice if we<br />
could get into it."<br />
What happened is all of us at that point were spending maybe<br />
$100,000, $150,000 on circulation promotion. McGraw Hill says we<br />
want to get out there, we're going to spend a million dollars.<br />
They're mailing 10 times as much as we are. They're going to trade<br />
shows with big, elaborate booths and handing out all kinds of...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Free magazines.<br />
<br />
David: Not only free magazines but other stuff. That was half of it. The<br />
other half, which was probably more than half, was the advertising<br />
sales. We were using reps. We had different reps in different parts<br />
of the country, paying the rep commission on the advertising. When<br />
you are a McGraw Hill or a Hurst or a Ziff Davis you've got an in-<br />
house staff. They would have a reception at one of the computer<br />
conferences, a big deal.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We used to have a hospitality suite at the hotels in some of these<br />
conferences and then we would bring little hunks of cheese that we<br />
cut up from home and sneak the bottles of wine up the back stairway<br />
and they were having these big things with the giant balls of<br />
shrimp.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. It was just an order of magnitude different than what we<br />
could do. What happened, really, was that it got to the point where<br />
there were only three, really two, serious bidders that were still<br />
looking for a magazine and there are still about four magazines,<br />
four decent quality magazines, on the market and one was Compute,<br />
one was Interface Age. Personal Computing had just sold, there was<br />
us, and I forget who the fourth one was. There was four.<br />
<br />
Kevin: There were more magazines than buyers at this point.<br />
<br />
David: That's right. There were a lot more magazines, too, but there were<br />
four major players. One of the buyers, I didn't really regard them<br />
as serious, and that was Atari. I think they wanted to back into<br />
the thing. The two buyers left were CBS, and they had a magazine<br />
division at that time, and Ziff Davis and that was it. I said,<br />
"Man, I've got to make a deal here." That's what happened.<br />
I look back with hindsight. I said the guy, Robert I forget his<br />
last name, that owned Compute magazine, he held out. He held out<br />
until the end and he said, "I'm better than Interface Age," and he<br />
was and whatever the other one was, Family Computing, "I'm better<br />
than them." He got a really nice payoff from CBS because it was the<br />
last one and they wanted him. I don't know. If I had held off a<br />
little more would I have gotten more? Probably.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How much did you get?<br />
<br />
David: Can we publish this figure?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't know. I don't think we ever have.<br />
<br />
David: No, we never have.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's my chance for a scoop.<br />
<br />
David: Pardon?<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's my chance for a scoop.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] I'd rather not say. I can tell you Compute, if you ever<br />
read that number, which you will, it was seven times that much. It<br />
was huge. Huge. At that point, I think CBS just said we've got to<br />
get into this. We've really got to do something. The big loser was<br />
Bob Jones at Interface Age. He had a good magazine. That was a<br />
good, solid magazine. Bob Jones, he went to shows, he was always in<br />
a suit and tie. He would have fit into the corporate environment<br />
very well but he held out too long. I think he was holding out for<br />
even more.<br />
That's what I was afraid of. Less than a year later he was out of<br />
business. There was no way you could compete with these big guys.<br />
Ziff instantly started having these receptions at PC expos.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They had ad reps all over the country.<br />
<br />
David: Ad reps, yeah. Oh my gosh. We would not have survived.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Again, you [inaudible 00:41:03] .<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Not exactly right but yes. Wasn't bad. Wasn't bad.<br />
<br />
Kevin: But Ziff didn't have it for very long before they let it go. It was<br />
only a couple of years.<br />
<br />
David: It was almost four years. Three and a half years. They did a study,<br />
and this is one of the classics. I've been making a presentation at<br />
Leslie Park last year on the 10 biggest blunders in personal<br />
computing, and actually it's up to 12 now. One was, and I still<br />
feel that it was huge, is that Ziff Davis analyzed that market in<br />
'85 and determined that the home market, the market for home<br />
computers, had reached saturation. Five percent of the homes have a<br />
computer. That's it.<br />
There were three things, three major conclusions from their survey.<br />
I think probably one and a half of them were pretty good and one<br />
and a half were just absolutely wrong. The home market reaching<br />
saturation, wrong. The second one was that they said that the<br />
magazines that would be successful would be those that were focused<br />
on specific brands of computers. Are you getting all that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: With the IBM PC it really brought standardization to the industry.<br />
Their analysis was that Apple and PC were going to be the dominant<br />
players in the future and in that they were right. They said we've<br />
got to have a magazine that's just focused on those two and they<br />
did. What was their Apple magazine? They had two Apple magazines.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A+.<br />
<br />
David: But they also had the one for the Mac.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mac User.<br />
<br />
David: They had two Apple magazines and then PC. PC they spun off a whole<br />
bunch. PC Week.<br />
<br />
Betsy: PC Junior.<br />
<br />
David: A bunch of them. In any event, they were right in that. The other<br />
one that they were semi-right, in the long term future they were<br />
totally wrong but in the short term future they were probably<br />
right, and that they looked at...We had been covering bulletin<br />
board systems. CompuServe, whatever its predecessor was, basically<br />
online type of stuff.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Genie.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. They said that's just a flash in a pan, online stuff. Well, in<br />
'85 it was. It took a while. It took another 8 to 10 years for that<br />
but then oh my God. You know what's happened today. If they had<br />
stuck with Creative Computing and rather than trying to make it a<br />
small business focused magazine but kept the home and the online<br />
focus we would have owned the Internet market today, absolutely<br />
owned it. It would have been a bigger magazine than all the others<br />
put together. Hindsight is 20/20.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I know it wasn't your choice but do you have regret about that?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: At the time it was devastating.<br />
<br />
David: Absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was like someone killing your child.<br />
<br />
David: At the time, we sat in these meetings up in Stanford, Connecticut,<br />
of all places. The reason for that is Bill Ziff. What happened in<br />
the interim a year or two after they purchased Creative Computing<br />
and PC, Bill Ziff came down with cancer really big time and was<br />
afraid of dying next year. So he was moving all of his resources<br />
and the holdings outside of New York to avoid really major<br />
taxation. I'm not sure that Connecticut was much better but he was<br />
splitting them between Connecticut and Florida. Anyway, we wound up<br />
having a bunch of meetings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was trying to maintain residence in Connecticut.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I guess that was it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was living in the Crown Plaza.<br />
<br />
David: I remember the last one. We were up at the hotel.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Crown Plaza. It was Stanford, it wasn't Harvard.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, Stanford.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I said Harvard.<br />
<br />
David: When they finally came and said we're going to shut this down. That<br />
was a devastating time. We probably could have continued to work<br />
for Ziff if we had been willing to go into New York but when you<br />
get used to working a mile or two from where you live the idea of<br />
commuting into New York, who knows what the job would have been.<br />
Bye. That was it. That was, in retrospect, a mistake.<br />
The other thing that happened as a result of Bill Ziff having this<br />
bout with cancer is that Ziff Davis sold off all of their other<br />
special interest magazines. Popular Boating, Popular Photography.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yachting, Modern Bride.<br />
<br />
David: They had a big group of travel magazines. Actually, one of the<br />
things they did after Creative Computing was to shut down...we got<br />
friendly with the publisher and some of the people in the traveling<br />
division and we started doing some freelance travel writing.<br />
I was writing a monthly column for one of the travel magazines that<br />
went to travel agents on automating your travel office and so on,<br />
which was an interesting thing because there's a small business<br />
that really depended upon computers with the reservation systems<br />
and all the airlines had a different reservation system. You had to<br />
have Saber.<br />
<br />
A lot of them would go with one and make an agreement with somebody<br />
else to make their other reservations. In any event, it was a bad<br />
system and I was writing a column on how to make this work for you.<br />
As you know, I don't know how many months later we got into the<br />
Atari camp.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was your next gig?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. It was Joe Sugarman, remember, that hooked us up with Atari.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I thought it was Neil Harris.<br />
<br />
David: He was the one we worked with but it was Sugarman.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because he came from Commodore. I didn't know it was Joe Sugarman.<br />
<br />
David: He ran a company called JS&A for Joe Sugarman and Associates. They<br />
were the first one that took these full page ads in lots of<br />
different magazines and the quarter page...<br />
<br />
Betsy: The first advertorials.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, advertorial. The first print advertorials. Really serious<br />
stuff. Out of that, he spawned at least a dozen other companies.<br />
Sharper Image is a Sugarman and it's a spinoff. They've got a whole<br />
page just focused on this air ionizer or some crazy product, but he<br />
sold tons of that stuff. Then he started offering courses. He was<br />
on the verge of doing some big deal with Atari and so he knew all<br />
the people out there.<br />
I had taken his course and started running the ad. In fact, there's<br />
probably one in one of those issues that is basically a Sugarman<br />
ad. And so anyway, you took the course, too. So we got to know him.<br />
He got to know us, and we kept up. And, oh, OK. Creative Computing<br />
has folded, and I'm trying to get something going with Atari and<br />
getting their magazine really serious. And so he was the one that<br />
hooked us up with them. By the way, I'm surprised that you don't<br />
have Atari Explorer on your website<br />
<br />
Kevin: On the website? Well, the deal with my Atari magazines website is<br />
I've always strove to get permission. Atari can't be owned by the<br />
same company for more than three months at time.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's hard to get permission that way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You can't get permission. But it's out there, elsewhere. There are<br />
other archivists who don't bother to get permission. That's another<br />
good way to do things. Yeah, it's out there. I think Archive.org<br />
has it.<br />
<br />
David: Really? Yeah, because I hadn't seen it. I was looking for<br />
something...I still get inquires every once in a while from<br />
somebody that wants something in one of the previous magazines that<br />
we've published.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That's why I don't' risk it. There's a few magazine that I just<br />
absolutely would not, because it's owned by some giant monolith<br />
corporation now, and they need to hold on everything even if it's<br />
30 years old.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because someday they might be able to make money from it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right. That's why that's not there.<br />
Talk to me about...You did some weird stuff. The weird stuff I'm<br />
thinking of is the board game.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: "Computer Rage."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We just saw that. We might not have even remembered what it was it,<br />
but we saw it last night at the museum.<br />
<br />
David: They have one in the Collection's area of the Computer Museum. They<br />
didn't even know that we published it. I thought, "Look at this."<br />
<br />
Kevin: You did Computer Rage, which was weird; I want to ask you about<br />
that. You did the record album.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The record album made way more sense than the game.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, well it was a guy named Allan. He was a colonel at that time<br />
and he came to see me with the idea for the computer game.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I forgot about that.<br />
<br />
David: He was a colonel in the Army and had something to do with<br />
educational programs. The Army said people should know more about<br />
how computers work and everything else. He said, "The games that<br />
are on the market are pretty tacky and not fun. I've devised<br />
something." We worked together with him. We finally decided, "All<br />
right. We'll publish this game. By the way, he's a general and<br />
finally retired.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But he's not financing his retirement with [inaudible 00:54:29] .<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: No, not at all.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Will anyone buy this?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We did overprint.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't a big seller or big success, but we sold enough of them.<br />
Now the record was a little different. There was a guy named Dick<br />
Moberg who, at the time, was the president of the Philadelphia Area<br />
Computer Society. The first two personal computer festivals were<br />
actually in New Jersey, not the west coast. The West Coast Computer<br />
Faire came later with Jim Warren and that group. John Dilks started<br />
this computer festival in Atlantic City. This was before Atlantic<br />
City was a big casino place, but...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well, it was a casino place, but...<br />
<br />
David: ...but it was pretty tacky.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It still is.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Not like now.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not like now where it's so classy.<br />
<br />
David: In any event, they were having some issues with the hotel and the<br />
convention center in Atlantic City. Dick Moberg said, "We people in<br />
Philadelphia can do a better job than you guys in New Jersey." And<br />
he got together with what was his name? Lenny? And<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh! Saul Levis.<br />
<br />
David: Saul Levis, who was the president of the New Jersey amateur<br />
computer group. The two of them got together and said yeah, it'll<br />
be more convenient if we do a thing in Philadelphia. And Saul<br />
Levis, he had put together the first Trenton computer festival. It<br />
wasn't a big huge thing; it's gotten to be gigantic. In any event<br />
they said OK, we'll do this. At that point, this was '78; the Apple<br />
had just come out and people were making little plug-in<br />
peripherals.<br />
There was a company that...I'm not going to be able to remember who<br />
it was. They made a nice little plug-in board for the Apple. What<br />
they had was a very nice thing on the screen where you could<br />
position notes and then have them played back. So it was a visual<br />
programming of music.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Music Construction Center?<br />
<br />
Betsy: There were ads for it in magazines.<br />
<br />
David: No, it was a guy out of Denver. I don't remember. Anyway, before<br />
that everything had appeared line by line. But there were some<br />
reasonable playback systems that were starting to come on the<br />
market for the S-100 bus. There were about four of them. The<br />
programming was a little bit harrier, but nonetheless they sounded<br />
OK. And then there was still the leftovers in a sense that people<br />
that were doing work on mainframes to process music.<br />
So Dick Moberg said, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could get a number<br />
of these together?" And of course there's the Philadelphia<br />
Orchestra, we'll make it a Philadelphia Computer Music Festival! So<br />
it was largely his idea, but then, how do you publicize it? Well,<br />
you've got this magazine that's in your backyard, that was willing<br />
to recruit some people and publicize it. So we got about...I don't<br />
know at the festival there were probably 25 or 30 people that had<br />
stuff.<br />
<br />
They recorded it all, which in retrospect was a bit of a mistake<br />
because they had problems with one of the two channels in the<br />
stereo. They had the big reel-to-reel tape recorder, one of the<br />
channels was seriously too low. And then they said, "Well, we've<br />
got this wonderful tape; what are we going to do with it?" And I<br />
said, "Well, I'll do something with it."<br />
<br />
I hooked up with a studio in the city that made records, and we<br />
went in there and corrected the low channel a little bit, not<br />
totally, but enough that it sounded like stereo. And put together a<br />
vinyl record!<br />
<br />
I edited out a lot of the poor quality performances, made the<br />
record, and that sold! It sold pretty well. Our biggest problem was<br />
shipping. How do you ship a 12-inch vinyl record without it<br />
breaking? But that sold pretty well. That, of course, died off<br />
along with everything else when Creative Computing got killed by<br />
Ziff. But, I still had the original test pressing of that, the<br />
original, original.<br />
<br />
I played it back, and it sounded very good. Put it into, I forget<br />
what the software was, but, it was one, the digital routine. It<br />
would have been nice if I still had the original tape, but, I<br />
didn't. But, OK, it's got a little bit of deterioration, going to a<br />
record.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, we're not talking about losing overtones of a<br />
violin up at 15,000 hertz. It was within a narrow band, to begin<br />
with, in any event. But that did let me totally correct the left<br />
channel and bring it up to what it should be. I put that out. I'm<br />
selling CDs now, of that.<br />
<br />
In fact, a guy from Australia ordered one, and obviously, the<br />
postage to send anything overseas is a lot more. He said, "Why<br />
don't you just make MP3 files out of it?" Because, they're WAV<br />
files, the way they are now. I go, "OK."<br />
<br />
This is very recent, like within the last couple of weeks, I<br />
downloaded some software, "Convert WAV to MP3," converted it, sent<br />
them the files. They said, "That's great." What I think what I'll<br />
probably do is try to figure out how I can make them available from<br />
a website.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You've apparently forgotten that, like, 10 years ago, I did that.<br />
They're there.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. I know.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They're at vintagecomputermusic.com.<br />
<br />
David: Are they MP3s?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Well, then, I don't have to do it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You dummy.<br />
<br />
David: Bam. I did remember. I didn't know that you did them all. I thought<br />
you did a sample.<br />
<br />
Kevin: No. They're all there. I can see you're getting reflux.<br />
<br />
David: Boom. I wasted a little time. I waste a lot of time, these days.<br />
That was a cool thing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just think it was neat that you guys were willing to take chances<br />
with weird stuff.<br />
<br />
David: Where we took chances with really weird stuff was in the software.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Software publishing?<br />
<br />
David: We had a brand called, Sensational Software. Unfortunately, Ziff<br />
decided it was competing with some potential advertisers, which it<br />
was, in a sense. They killed it off. But, we had some really good<br />
stuff. We had the Apple game, what the heck was it? It was ported<br />
directly over from the arcade games.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Was it, "Space Invaders"?<br />
<br />
David: "Space Invaders."<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was a clone of, "Space Invaders"?<br />
<br />
David: It was the real.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You got it from, Jeff Lee's guy.<br />
<br />
David: Because, "Space Invaders," the Japanese game, was one of the first<br />
full-sized console video games where they used a general-purpose<br />
chip. "Space Invaders," was programmed for the 6502, Apple.<br />
We bought it from this Japanese company, and we had the only real<br />
"Space Invaders" game. That was one, and a couple of others that we<br />
really could have gone places with. That was just about the time<br />
that Ziff came in and said, "Nah, you can't have this anymore."<br />
<br />
They were into printed media, so, they kept the books going, but,<br />
not any of the other stuff. The other thing we had, was, speaking<br />
of computer music, a little division, that probably could have<br />
gotten a lot bigger, called Peripherals Plus. We were marketing a<br />
little computer music board, it was an S-100 bus once. But if we<br />
had then...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Didn't we have a plotter, too?<br />
<br />
David: Yep. We had about five or six interesting, low-level products. But,<br />
again, Ziff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That stuff was really competing with the advertisers.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Obviously, that wasn't our intent. But, yes it was. We also<br />
offered courses at that time. Do you remember, at County College?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't.<br />
<br />
David: That was just at when we moved into the new building at Hanover. We<br />
had two people that were doing that.<br />
<br />
Betsy: One of them was that crazy, Larry guy. He was seriously weird.<br />
<br />
David: County College of Morris, we reached an agreement that we would<br />
teach their Introductory Computer course. Not for their day<br />
students, but they offered evening courses, adult education, we<br />
were doing that. Fingers in a lot of pies, at that point.<br />
Actually, from that standpoint, it was, probably, good that Ziff<br />
got us a little bit more focused, and back to the roots of<br />
publishing. Getting spread a little thin.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You went to Atari, got the Atari game, and you did the "Atari<br />
Explorer," right?<br />
<br />
David: "Atari Explorer." They had had an occasional publication, not<br />
really a magazine, but one that was focused on the games, and they<br />
decided that they could start that one up again. It started up with<br />
a new name. We called it, "Atarian." It was focused, basically, on<br />
video games. You buy one of their video games and you get an issue.<br />
Anyway, there were different ways that they were going to promote<br />
it.<br />
But, a year later Nintendo just, absolutely, buried "Atarian," in<br />
'89. They kept Atari Spore going for, I think, two more issues,<br />
right?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Was it two?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember the details.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't much.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I remember why they killed it.<br />
<br />
David: Ms. Feisty here. Come on. You've got to tell the story here.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They were playing games with our printer. Production schedule.<br />
Everybody had a production schedule. We never missed our production<br />
date, getting things to the printer, getting them mailed. We just<br />
did it because that's what you had to do. I will probably get sued<br />
for this. Atari started not paying the printer and the printer says<br />
we're not going to print this until we get paid. The date kept<br />
slipping and slipping and the subscribers would be calling up and<br />
saying, "Where's my magazine?"<br />
This went on. It was bi-monthly. It went on for maybe six months. I<br />
finally wrote an editorial in which I explained to the readers<br />
exactly what was going on. They didn't see it until it was printed.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
David: That didn't get into the magazine, though.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It did.<br />
<br />
David: That's right, it did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They never saw it. We were producing it out of [inaudible 01:10:07]<br />
New Jersey and printing it in eastern Pennsylvania and they never<br />
saw it until it was too late. My tenure was cut short but I didn't<br />
really care at that point. I was sick of them. It was really hard.<br />
They're not easy people to deal with, even when the owners last for<br />
more than three months. That was my suicide by editorial. The only<br />
time in my life I've ever been fired.<br />
<br />
David: I didn't realize they didn't read that beforehand but I should<br />
have. I should have.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] I probably wouldn't have gotten fired if they had.<br />
<br />
David: That was the straw that broke the camera's back.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But then John [inaudible 01:11:05] kept doing it a little bit.<br />
<br />
David: I know. In a lot of cases, particularly with the games magazine,<br />
they wanted to approve everything that went in it. If you do an<br />
objective product review, you call it like it is. Oh m gosh, there<br />
was one, it wasn't just one product but a roundup after Consumer<br />
Electronics' show, and I don't remember what it was. Atari had<br />
brought out some new products that really weren't ready to go.<br />
In some cases I just said, "I'm not going to say anything about<br />
this one or these two or three. I'll focus on the ones that are<br />
ready to go or are in good shape." Oh my gosh. "What about this?<br />
This is a wonderful thing." "Well, maybe it will be but it isn't<br />
yet." We had issues all along on censorship and them changing what<br />
we had written and everything. As Betsy said, they were not nice<br />
people to work with. I forget, the two brothers.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Trammell.<br />
<br />
David: Trammell, yeah. That came from Commodore.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Jack and somebody else. Jack and his brother.<br />
<br />
David: It was interesting because yesterday I saw Nolan Bushnell. He was<br />
at that event. Nolan was flamboyant, but basically he had integrity<br />
and he was an honest guy. Man, oh man. Didn't stay and the<br />
corporation changed after he left.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Then you're done with Atari and then it's straight to military<br />
vehicles there?<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] No.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was a hiatus.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, man. We published magazines, in-house magazines, for a couple<br />
other organizations. Did one for Nabisco called...I don't even<br />
remember but it was for their marketing department. Published that<br />
for some period of time and then they decided to bring it in-house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was more like a newsletter.<br />
<br />
David: It was 16 pages. It was getting there.<br />
<br />
Betsy: 16 pages is a newsletter.<br />
<br />
David: All right. Magazine format. Let's put it that way. We did some<br />
fulfillment. Basically, a lot of freelance writing on the travel<br />
field.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Stuffed dogs. The stuffed dogs. Remember those four dogs for my<br />
brother?<br />
<br />
David: That's fulfillment. Fulfillment for Con Edison. I published a<br />
couple newsletters for a while, one called "Effective Investing"<br />
and one called "Effective Communication" for writers. We're talking<br />
early '90s.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was when people still cared, thought that there might be a<br />
correct way to do something and they wanted to know what it was.<br />
<br />
David: That was focused on "Take this computer and start to use it as a<br />
tool. Don't be afraid of the thing." '91/'92 not everybody was<br />
using a computer yet or a personal computer. That was the<br />
orientation of that. Then the other thing we got into big time was<br />
we'd been involved with a local rescue mission for men with drug,<br />
alcohol, homeless issues and we were writing and producing their<br />
newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We were producing all of their fundraising material.<br />
<br />
David: We started, I think, with the newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, we did everything. Appeal letters and newsletters and<br />
maintaining their database, the donor database. It took a lot of<br />
time.<br />
<br />
David: We did that for five years. Then '96 I got an opportunity to buy<br />
this crazy military vehicles magazine for people that were<br />
restoring old historic military vehicles. It was a magazine but it<br />
was I guess more of a glorified newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was horrible.<br />
<br />
David: It was horrible but it was really terrible. In fact, the editor or<br />
the publisher, whatever, the owner, he'd take the articles however<br />
the writer would send them. If it was double spaced type, boom,<br />
that's what would appear in the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Save all the typesetting.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He had zero typesetting expense.<br />
<br />
David: Zero editing. He just took anything that came in, put it in. Ads<br />
the same way. Half the ads were hand written. Well, not half, but a<br />
significant number had corrections on them by hand. Oh my gosh. It<br />
was so terrible. I made it into a real magazine and built it up. At<br />
that point the circulation had been about 10,000. We built it up<br />
and we were pushing close to 20,000 magazines. It was a real<br />
magazine. I sold it to Crowsey publications.<br />
Then they, which I did not realize at the time, the owner, Chet<br />
Crowsey, had put the whole company up for sale and he sold the<br />
company a year or two later to some other specialty magazine<br />
publisher. We're talking narrow, narrow niche. They published a lot<br />
of, what'd they call it, white tail bow hunting. Really, really<br />
narrow stuff. Up in northern Wisconsin is where they were based. In<br />
any event, he sold it.<br />
<br />
The new publishers, their whole stick was making money. They<br />
immediately raised the subscription price of military vehicles. We<br />
were charging $18 a year which was fine and they raised it to<br />
$21.95 or something and they raised the advertising rates and<br />
everything else.<br />
<br />
The last I knew, the circulation was back down around 10,000.<br />
[laughs] It doesn't pay off to take that approach. I didn't have<br />
the same emotional connection, with that as I did with Creative<br />
Computing and the other magazines there. Fine, you do what you want<br />
with the magazine, it's OK.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You didn't care too much?<br />
<br />
David: Nah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What do you guys do now? It seems like charity work and [inaudible<br />
01:19:45] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. I run a non-profit called Beyond the Walls and he runs his<br />
website and does Bible studies.<br />
<br />
David: Right. Actually, Betsy, the organization she has, she's executive<br />
director of Beyond the Wall, that's gotten huge.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's getting bigger and bigger.<br />
<br />
David: It's gotten huge.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think huge is probably an exaggeration.<br />
<br />
David: Well, not huge like a Gates Foundation thing.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I wish. We started in 2005 with 26 volunteers going to Guatemala to<br />
work with this organization that works with the people who scavenge<br />
in the Guatemala City garbage dump. The dump is in a ravine. It<br />
started in the early '50s and as it has filled up around the edges<br />
they put a couple layers of sand on it and let it sit for a bit and<br />
then the people build houses on it out of scraps and things that<br />
they made.<br />
This organization called Potter's House that we work with has been<br />
working with them for 26 years. They have an education program,<br />
micro-enterprise and health and various things that they do. Since<br />
2005 we've been sending volunteer teams. We're not the only ones<br />
sending volunteer teams down there to build houses and do<br />
healthcare and do stuff with the kids. So we started with 26 and by<br />
the end of the year we'll be well over 150 volunteers. We'll have<br />
three weeks this summer, I'll have 135 over three weeks this<br />
summer.<br />
<br />
It started in our backyard and one of the reasons that we wanted<br />
to...It started in the church and we started the organization<br />
partially because it's easier to raise money if you're not a church<br />
and it's also easier to make the volunteer opportunities available<br />
to people. If you say "Oh I'm going to Guatemala." "Oh I'd love to<br />
go with you! Who's going?" "It's my church." "Oh."<br />
<br />
But, if it's this local non-profit it's more appealing and we've<br />
really succeeded in doing that because we have people not only from<br />
in our own community, but this year we're going to have a family<br />
from Oklahoma, about six families from Texas, several people from<br />
Florida.<br />
<br />
David: You got the Virginia.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Virginia. It's like oh my goodness. How is this happening?<br />
<br />
Kevin: And everyone goes out to Guatemala and does the [inaudible<br />
01:22:31] ?<br />
[cross talk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. We all meet in Guatemala. I have three teams. One each week,<br />
and I'll be there the whole time and they'll come down and probably<br />
each team will build two or three houses. They'll do medical<br />
clinic, they'll do day camp for kids, soccer or baseball, sports<br />
things.<br />
They were about teenagers, so they love to do the...Everybody does<br />
construction in the morning. Then, in the afternoon teenage girls<br />
and some of the boys who want to do other stuff will help out with<br />
these other kid-related activities. That's what I'm doing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My wife is in Africa this week and last doing something similar.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Cool.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Which is why I have to leave shortly to go get my kids.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: What part of Africa is she in?<br />
<br />
Kevin: She did some stuff for Special Olympics. Then, they were helping<br />
build something at a food bank. I don't know that much yet, because<br />
she's not home yet.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Cool.<br />
<br />
David: That's terrific. She'll be changed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: She keeps telling that she wished I could've come, and I do, too.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You have this kid. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: We've got the two kids. The six-year-old doesn't feed herself real<br />
well.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: She can't drive to school.<br />
<br />
David: Your annual budget has gone from 0 to what? Are you going to hit<br />
about 150, 200,000 this year?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's over 300 already.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, OK. [laughs] 300.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's small potatoes compared to...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: As my boss, the Chairman of the Board, and I'm the only employee,<br />
is fond of saying, "The people out there don't realize that we're<br />
just a bunch of schlumps sitting around a table making this stuff<br />
up as we go along. Very good leadership. He's a very good leader.<br />
<br />
David: We were trying to maybe see if we can touch base with the Gates<br />
Foundation when we were up there. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: We got a brochure into his hands.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we got a brochure into his hands and some other stuff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was Bill Gates there?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah. I had a picture of him that I had taken at the first<br />
Altair convention in 1976, before he had actually made the deal<br />
with Altair to develop BASIC. He had said, "I can do it," but they<br />
hadn't signed the whole thing. I've got a picture of him as a 20-<br />
year-old or thereabouts, talking at this little convention.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You showed it to him?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. I gave him a copy. The problem I had is that...some people<br />
keep everything. I pretty much give everything away.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, you are lying. You keep everything.<br />
<br />
David: I do keep a lot of stuff. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Then, you give it away later. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Well, when Stan Freiberger was putting together the "Fire in<br />
the Valley" book, I gave him a lot of photographs and I gave him<br />
the originals. Then the publisher said, "It's not good enough. The<br />
photo. You get the negative." OK, they're gone. Never any of that<br />
came back. In fact, what I had to do is scan the photo from the<br />
book to make the print to give to Bill.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Photos of being young and cute.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was his Woody Allen phase. He looked exactly like Woody Allen<br />
did at that phase in his life.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:26:30] too.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm sure there is.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It is a lot [inaudible 01:26:33] .<br />
<br />
David: She improves with age. Every year.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I saw the picture! You look the same.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, the instant Paul Allen showed up, of course, everybody's<br />
mingling around this museum. All of a sudden there was like an<br />
arrow head over in that direction.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was this sucking sound.<br />
<br />
David: And then Bill shows up and, oh my God, everybody has to go see<br />
Bill.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was talking to Bob Rynett this morning, the guy who organized it,<br />
and he said, "Oh, Paul was very happy. Paul was very pleased with<br />
the way the event went." He said his only regret was that he and<br />
Bill didn't have enough time to spend with the people. And I'm<br />
thinking, "Well, OK, if you just stayed a little longer."<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Well, at least Paul Allen did come to the dinner.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, he stayed a little longer, but Bill, he was in and out like<br />
a...<br />
<br />
David: Bill was there for maybe an hour.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He just showed up because he had to.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, exactly. It was a cameo.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:27:52] cameo there?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, yes. There I am. I was thinner then. Oh! There's Ted in his<br />
hat! And Peter [inaudible 01:28:02] . Who's that guy?<br />
<br />
David: Dick Heiser was at the convention and he had one of the hats. The<br />
Xanadu hat.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was wearing one of those hats. The rings were actually silver.<br />
Oh and there's Johnny Anderson. He's the one that wrote that<br />
crazy...<br />
<br />
This was our building.<br />
<br />
David: That was the greenhouse garage building that we started. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: And there was a hole. Was it you or my brother that made a hole in<br />
the wall for an air conditioner?<br />
<br />
David: It was your brother.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And the building was painted white after...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is that the air conditioner? You comment about the low tech air<br />
conditioning.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, that was in an actual window. This building had been painted<br />
white after and right about here a hole had been made in the wall<br />
for this through-the-wall air conditioner. It was rented and when<br />
we moved out, we had this hole in the wall. So, my brother takes<br />
this spare ceiling panel that we had. It was white and sort of<br />
stuffed it in the hole and filled it up so that it really didn't<br />
show any more. We never heard any more about it.<br />
<br />
David: That building today is...<br />
<br />
Betsy: They've made it very fancy.<br />
<br />
David: Oh my gosh! It's a boutique shop and it's really nice. And they<br />
didn't even tear it down. It wasn't a tear-down and rebuild. At any<br />
event, we were not into spending money on facilities. Absolutely<br />
not. The last place that we were in was a printing company had<br />
owned it and they had taken three very small houses that backed up<br />
to railroad tracks and then they built a large warehouse at the end<br />
that was relatively modern. Then they just connected the three<br />
houses with little walkway and so we were in the first house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You couldn't tell that it was two houses.<br />
<br />
David: No. The art department was in the second, then the software group<br />
was in the third one. We had our fulfillment and storage and stuff<br />
in the warehouse.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How much money did you spend on the facility?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not much.<br />
<br />
David: We were spending money on expansion, growing, grow, grow. Then Ziff<br />
Davis comes in, they say, "You got this wonderful warehouse."<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's our warehouse now, right?<br />
<br />
David: That's right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It wasn't though, because you owned it.<br />
<br />
David: I know, but in any event, they said we're going to use it. We're<br />
moving some of your operation, advertising, sales into New York,<br />
therefore you will have more space. It wasn't the trade-off of the<br />
same kind of space or anything. What they did is, they have all<br />
these other magazines at that point, things like "Popular Boating"<br />
and "Yachting" and everything else. All of those magazines, when<br />
you subscribed you got a premium. You got a tote bag or something.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A backpack or a cushion.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. They moved all of their premium fulfillment out to our<br />
warehouse. They said, "Because you're not going to have a software<br />
department anymore, so you won't have to ship any software. We're<br />
going to bring all of our premiums out there." We still have<br />
"Yachting" bags.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yachting bags and seat bags.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Speaking of fulfillment that was something that we did. We were<br />
real pioneers in doing our own fulfillment.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: That's true...<br />
<br />
Betsy: All magazines then used fulfillment houses. You would just send all<br />
the little cards and white mail and everything to your fulfillment<br />
house and they would just take care, enter it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Reader service cards and...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Exactly, and then they would send the labels.<br />
<br />
David: Everything went either to Boulder, Colorado, Des Moines, Iowa, or<br />
some place in Florida.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So when you say pioneers, does that mean you were cheap?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well no, because we were not getting good service, we weren't happy<br />
with the service the readers were getting. And so we decided to<br />
bring it in it house, and we brought a program from a company in<br />
Boston that had written a program to run a PDP11.<br />
And we did we brought the whole thing in-house. We had our own data<br />
entry people. Did all the caging, taking the money out in-house.<br />
Printed our own labels and ship, because then you had to print them<br />
and ship them because there was no electronic delivery.<br />
<br />
David: You know we were real pioneers there and we did spent some money.<br />
Because PDP1170 was not a low-end, with a platter and disk, 12<br />
inch, maybe 15 inch, but a big, big platter drive, and data entry<br />
terminals, DECWriters, VT05. And when Ziff came in, I mean they<br />
were blown away that we were doing our own fulfillment, and doing a<br />
very efficiently.<br />
And the other thing we were doing also was the reader service<br />
cards. We were doing all our own processing of that. The same<br />
computer is same system. A Mini Data System, that's what it was.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No.<br />
<br />
David: No? OK.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mini data was the one you were using...<br />
<br />
[Day 2]<br />
<br />
<br />
David: A couple of the questions you asked yesterday got us to thinking<br />
about things we probably should have mentioned or clarified.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK let's go, let me grab a pen.<br />
<br />
David: One of the corrections, Betsy remembered better than I. the<br />
embezzlement that we were talking about was actually 79 not 78 it<br />
doesn't make a lot of difference but was a year later. It was a<br />
year after I had left my day job, and I was really depending upon<br />
Creative Computing for my income and everything else. So to lose<br />
that was a big blow at that time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So that could have been the end of things right there?<br />
<br />
David: Yes absolutely it could have.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was 79 not 78, is what you're saying.<br />
<br />
David: That's what I said it was 79 not 78.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I was going to ask you to move closer to the microphone.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Actually I don't have to do this. My ego is completely uninvolved.<br />
I would go sit and play with the cats.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Please, please be here. You supplement Dave's memory.<br />
<br />
David: Yes exactly she's very good at that.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: I want to know, how are you going to know how to spell things? He<br />
used the name John Dilks. If you go to write it out, how do you<br />
know how to spell John Dilks?<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'll either Google it, and if it's not in Wikipedia, I'll have to<br />
come back to you and ask, or if they're mentioned in the magazines.<br />
I'll do my best.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm not saying it in a critical way, I'm just impressed that you<br />
don't ask.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just feel this way, I can have everything. I don't have to write<br />
it down. I can concentrate on the conversation, rather than taking<br />
notes.<br />
<br />
David: OK. One thing I thought would be kind of worthwhile...putting the<br />
whole era of the early computer magazines into a perspective. In a<br />
sense, personal computing itself went through several eras as it<br />
accelerated and became so widespread. It certainly didn't start<br />
that way.<br />
You almost have to look at a period before there were personal<br />
computers -- the pre-personal computer era, which I would say would<br />
be 1972 or so up through '75, when the first computers came out.<br />
What was happening then was you had big time-sharing systems.<br />
<br />
Then, manufacturers like DEC and HP were making smaller time-<br />
sharing systems for terminals on a computer. Specifically, Bob<br />
Albrecht opened up People's Computer Company down in San Carlos,<br />
San Mateo, one of the "Sans." It was an open to the public place.<br />
What were people going to do with computers? Well, he wrote this<br />
book of what to do after you hit return, of games.<br />
<br />
Then I wrote my book, not for his center, but for people in the<br />
east that had access to the same type of things on DEC computers.<br />
Those two books actually came out in '72. That was well<br />
before....There was an impetus for people to use computers. Even<br />
though it was mini-computers and they didn't really have their own,<br />
they did have access.<br />
<br />
That, I think, was an important thing because, then, when the kit<br />
computers first came out, which is '75, we really had the kit<br />
computer era from '75 to around '78. That's when it primary was,<br />
the do-it-yourself, build-it-yourself.<br />
<br />
Who did those computers appeal to? It was largely people who were<br />
OK with things like soldering guns. That was largely HAM radio<br />
people. You look at "73" magazine and "Radio Electronics," those<br />
were the ones that dragged the hardware people into the field, and<br />
"Popular Electronics," of course, with the Altair in January, '75.<br />
<br />
You had to know something about, and be a little bit capable with<br />
your hands to get into it. That continued but dwindled off by 1980,<br />
because of course, in '78, you had the three biggies, not biggies,<br />
but self-contained, assembled computers: the Commodore PET, TRS-80,<br />
and the Apple all came out in '78. They were proprietary platforms,<br />
nobody was sharing stuff.<br />
<br />
Actually, the S-100 bus was more shareable. More people got a card<br />
that you could plug into the S-100 bus. There was more, but on the<br />
other hand, you had to build it. That was really a stumbling block<br />
for a lot of people. Then processor technology with the SAL. OK,<br />
here's an S-100 bus machine, but it's all built. That was a big<br />
leap.<br />
<br />
Anyway, you had the, what I call, proprietary era from '78 to '82.<br />
Then it kind of dwindled off, although Apple certainly kept going.<br />
When the IBM PC came out, '81, '82, '83, that ushered in the<br />
standardization era. Everybody, "OK, we're going to make an IBM PC<br />
clone." It was really only Apple, and to a lesser extent, the Atari<br />
and the Commodore that kept going with their own proprietary stuff.<br />
They really couldn't keep going.<br />
<br />
At that time, we started working with Atari. They using the same<br />
chip that Apple had. I thought, "Man, that's an opportunity. Why<br />
don't they just make an agreement with Apple to run Apple software<br />
and everything." They got a 6502, that family of chips in there,<br />
why not? But that wasn't Atari's way of doing things, as you well<br />
know.<br />
<br />
In any event, they went through those stages. As a new one came<br />
along, the other one died off. That though then affected the<br />
magazines, Creative Computing, we came from the pre-era, in a<br />
sense. From the education applications and people having access to<br />
small, minicomputer time sharing systems. When Altair basic was<br />
announced, then it was the obvious thing that we would port over<br />
programs to that.<br />
<br />
Other magazines such as "Byte" and some of the hardware magazines,<br />
they really came from the HAM radio end of things. Wayne Green, who<br />
started "Byte," was publishing "73," which was the biggest magazine<br />
in HAM radio. HAM fests were one of the earliest places where<br />
computers were, or at least hardware, do-it-yourself computers were<br />
really seen and popularized. Wasn't till a little later that we had<br />
computer festivals.<br />
<br />
The real early computer festivals in '75, '76, had a big overlap<br />
with Ham radio. The early ones in New Jersey. That was the earliest<br />
ones. It was, I think, more, not more, but at least half was<br />
oriented to Ham radio. Then, it broadened out, of course, with more<br />
applications being reproduced. Anyway, I think it's kind of<br />
important to know how things fit into that whole scheme of things.<br />
<br />
Magazines either came from the Ham radio and hardware side of<br />
things. They had a different perspective than those like Creative<br />
Computing.<br />
<br />
Well, Peoples' Computer Company, Bob Aldberg, could have had a real<br />
winning magazine, but he was too much in the alternative mode. So,<br />
Peoples' Computer Company never really made it as a magazine. He<br />
didn't want to do advertising or anything that would...<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was a different avenue. It was more like a tabloid-style<br />
newspaper.<br />
<br />
David: Newspaper, yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was more glossy.<br />
<br />
David: Exactly.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was a very different field.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Again, magazine publishing. I remember, early on, I was on a<br />
TV show. McNeil Lehrer Report on Public Broadcasting. Life Magazine<br />
was being re-launched and Time-Warner was spending a ton of money<br />
on this re-launch. They had the publisher of Life Magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was probably Time-Life back then. I don't think it...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. That's right. It wasn't Time. Well, I think it was close to<br />
the time that they merged. Anyway. Yeah. It was Time-Life. Then,<br />
they had me. Sort of the opposite extreme.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You're going to be covered in cat hair by the time you're here.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, I am sure.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's OK. But it matches and sort of goes with it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. It matches fine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You have kind of a theme here. The black and white.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes. Yes. Sorry to interrupt.<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, they were interviewing both of us. They were going to spend<br />
more money on their first issue than our entire annual budget, for<br />
everything. The difference in big publishers, because we we're<br />
talking about that a little bit yesterday, is huge. Really huge.<br />
Now, the interesting thing is there was a magazine back then. I<br />
don't know if it's still around today, called Folio. It was a<br />
magazine for magazine publishers. They covered all aspects of it.<br />
Subscription fulfillment, typesetting and everything else and the<br />
business aspects of running a magazine.<br />
<br />
They had some figures, which were true for a long period of time.<br />
That one out of seven magazine startups makes it for one year. One<br />
out of seven. That's low. Of those, one out of seven makes it for<br />
five years. So, were talking about...<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think Wayne told me almost the exact same statistic.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. One out of 50 new magazines makes it for five years or more.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: Once you make it five years, you're probably good to go for awhile.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
The new Life Magazine comes back, roaring back in. Where are they<br />
today, or even 10 years later from that point. Gone. Didn't make<br />
it. In any event, yesterday we were talking a little bit about<br />
where did we put all our money.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
David: Well, all our money wasn't an awful lot compared to big publishers.<br />
We were a small player. We're big in that field, but...<br />
<br />
Kevin: You're a big fish in a little bowl.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Yeah. There wasn't a lot. Betsy reminded me this morning that<br />
one of the things we did to, in a sense, keep control, is we bought<br />
our own typesetting equipment.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Used of course.<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Used.<br />
<br />
David: Used. Yes. We didn't want to send stuff out to a typesetter<br />
where...what did you [inaudible 00:14:22] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was the same thing with the fulfillment. You are sending it to a<br />
service that gives your work to a minimum wage person who couldn't<br />
care less. Puts her time in and...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Plus you still had code and things that needed to be done right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Done right. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Otherwise it was useless.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. We didn't typeset the code usually. We would actually pace<br />
down the printouts. Part of it was for efficiency and probably, in<br />
the long run, it was cheaper. Just to turn your typesetting around,<br />
send it out and wait for your galleys to come back. Then you<br />
proofread them. Then you'd send it back. Then they make the<br />
corrections maybe and you get it back again. So we said, well...and<br />
then we got this used, copy graphic was it?<br />
<br />
David: Mm-hmm. Yep.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Typesetter. Found a young woman who knew typesetting and hired her.<br />
We bought our own stat camera. We always used to have to send all<br />
the stats and [inaudible 00:15:34] out to be made.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: That was huge then before...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Had our own darkroom.<br />
<br />
David: ...everything was computerized publishing. Yeah. We had our own<br />
darkroom and our own stat camera with the thing that goes over a<br />
screen basically to make it into dots.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: To do that. To make those negatives or [inaudible 00:15:56] , which<br />
are the positive. That was something again. You sent it out and you<br />
get it back.<br />
I said, "Oh, you know what, we got a little more type here than<br />
expected. We want to crop this. Well, we send it out again, and oh<br />
my gosh." Doing all of that in-house, but it cost money. In a<br />
sense, just for the hardware and capital improvements that you<br />
needed to do that.<br />
<br />
We were spending it on that and expansion into other things like<br />
the software. One of the other ones that I was thinking of that we<br />
did, that certainly, really didn't bring us any tangible reward,<br />
was that we were doing some consulting when we started developing<br />
software. We started doing consulting to places like the<br />
Exploratorium in San Francisco. And Sesame Place. That was a big<br />
one for us.<br />
<br />
Sesame Place was a theme park right in our own backyard in New<br />
Jersey. They were going to have these terminals that you could go<br />
up to. One of the programs was Mix and Match the Muppets. You could<br />
take different parts of Muppets and combine them. We wrote a part<br />
of that routine and a whole bunch of stuff that made computers and<br />
these things not computers but approachable things for kids.<br />
<br />
We did some work for the Capital Children's Museum in Washington<br />
and Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Again, did it help us?<br />
Maybe. Did we gain a little reputation? Maybe. Did it translate to<br />
the bottom line? Probably not. As Betsy said, it was fun for you to<br />
do that, wasn't it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, it was fun. It gave him fun things to do.<br />
<br />
David: That was one way that we, in a sense, spent some money.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It makes sense. You guys were the computer experts, probably by<br />
orders of magnitude. Who are they going to go to?<br />
<br />
David: That's right. Interactive games, yeah. I already had a good selling<br />
book out there that was visible, known. We did a lot of that kind<br />
of stuff. Some of it was just fun to do. Another place where we put<br />
I won't say a lot of money but we went to a lot of these shows,<br />
well, there were some that were strictly personal computer shows,<br />
but then also tried to push into things like the consumer<br />
electronics show.<br />
We were the only magazine at the consumer electronics. That's a<br />
huge, huge show. Twice a year, one in Chicago and one in Las Vegas.<br />
We'd take the smallest booth that you could but, still, it was a<br />
fair chunk of change to go to that, but that's how I felt we got<br />
the reach. They were pushing at a lower level. That was video games<br />
mostly at that point. Although we weren't in that market, I just<br />
felt that that was someplace that we wanted to be.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you think that was worthwhile?<br />
<br />
David: I don't know. We were mainly looking for retail stores to sell the<br />
magazine. That was my main purpose for going there. No, it probably<br />
wasn't. It probably was not and it cost us a lot of money to go to<br />
the shows. You have to experiment and do those things. We started<br />
reporting on new developments at the consumer electronics show and<br />
there was some overlap with Computer Inc but it was mostly video<br />
games. No, it didn't have a real good payoff. [laughs]<br />
Then there was the Boston show we went to where Betsy's feistiness<br />
really came out. You go to those shows. I'm not talking about one<br />
of these local computer shows or something. You go to a big show.<br />
You've got to use union labor. We had a computer at our booth. We<br />
wanted to plug it in. You're going to plug in your computer? No,<br />
you can't plug it in. You've got to hire an electrician for an hour<br />
for $75 to plug in your computer.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was a bit extreme. I don't think that was actually true.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know how much it was but you had to use union labor for<br />
different things. Betsy took exception to that at one show and<br />
actually came to blows.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was carrying stuff off the show floor. We were trying to get out.<br />
It was in Boston and we were going to drive back and we were trying<br />
to...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Go home at the end of the show?<br />
<br />
Betsy: ...go home at the end of the show. We were just carrying our<br />
cartons of leftover magazines and books and some union guy comes to<br />
me and starts telling me you can't do this and he was being very<br />
rude. So I punched him in the arm. [laughs] They were not happy.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you have to hire a special punching person to do that?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yes, exactly. I should have consulted with the shop steward before<br />
doing that.<br />
<br />
David: There was a follow-up to that. I'm not absolutely sure but I think<br />
the guy that was running that show was Shelley Adelman. He then<br />
approached us after that little incident. You can't do this. Betsy<br />
was really in his face about come on. We're a tiny little nit. Sure<br />
we can do it. We can carry our own stuff.<br />
Shelley Adelman, whose name you probably heard today, in a sense,<br />
got his start by running these smaller shows around the country and<br />
then he built up to running PC Expo in New York and Las Vegas and<br />
then he got into you run a show in Las Vegas you've got to make<br />
deals with the hotels and so on.<br />
<br />
The earlier PC shows in Las Vegas did not use the convention<br />
center. They were held in I think probably the Hilton. He got to<br />
know hotel people there and he started buying into hotels and today<br />
Shelley Adelman is huge. Not Caesars but he owns one of the really<br />
big casino operations. He's on Forbes list of top 100 wealthiest<br />
Americans.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sure he only uses union labor.<br />
<br />
David: I'm sure he does, absolutely. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's how he got where he is.<br />
<br />
David: We've crossed paths with some interesting people in different ways.<br />
There was another one I was thinking of. Actually, this is jumping<br />
around a little bit. Editorial, in different people submitting<br />
articles and then some people I would ask would you do something<br />
for us early, early on. That's another thing we went to. I went to<br />
comic cons and the sci-fi cons to promote the magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was early.<br />
<br />
David: That was early, very early. I've got to tell you one little<br />
incident there. I also went to small press publisher conventions. I<br />
went to one over Labor Day weekend, and I don't know what year it<br />
was. It was probably '75, '76 maybe. The place that they gave this<br />
small press to exhibit was one platform up in the subway under<br />
Lincoln Center.<br />
Lincoln Center, of course, huge, but down one level is not shops.<br />
There may be a few shops but it was a big, open platform. That's<br />
where we were exhibiting. I had my magazines out there on a table<br />
and I was talking to these other underground publishers and so on,<br />
typical.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's why they put you there. It's underground.<br />
<br />
David: Underground, yes. It was a Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Saturday,<br />
Sunday, Monday. I said, "I can't be here on Sunday." Talked to the<br />
person next to me and I said, "I'm just going to leave a cigar box<br />
that says put your money in the box." He said, "You're nuts. We're<br />
in a New York subway system. You're going to come back with nothing<br />
in your box." I left a bunch of change in it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: And your ex-wife said you were too trusting.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] Yes. I left like 15 single dollar bills in there so people<br />
could make change and I just left it there, from Saturday to Monday<br />
and I came back Monday, about $40, $50 in the box. I don't know<br />
whether it paid for everything that was taken but it worked out<br />
fine. Yes, I was obviously too trusting, but at roughly the same<br />
time there was something going on. I think it was a sci-fi<br />
convention or world future society. Yeah, it was world future<br />
society convention.<br />
They had some notable people there. I was sitting down with Alvin<br />
Toffler in the lobby of the Colosseum and along comes over to us<br />
Isaac [inaudible 00:27:03] (ED: from context, they are talking about<br />
Isaac Asimov). What a wonderful little party. We had some coffee in<br />
the Colosseum and I said, "Isaac, can you write me an article?"<br />
"I got a good story from the robot series that hasn't been widely<br />
used or published and you can use that." So I got an early <br />
contribution from Isaac [inaudible 00:27:27] and Alvin<br />
Toffler wrote something for us.<br />
<br />
Anyway, got to know some interesting people at that point. Then who<br />
should submit an article, and by this time Betsy was the editor...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Out of transom comes an article from Michael Creighton. It was a<br />
program. I can't remember what it was about.<br />
<br />
David: For the Apple.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was a program for the Apple, but it was something really dumb.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know if you remember, we were reminded when Harry Garland<br />
was up at the thing in Seattle. Harry Garland was one of the first<br />
ones to produce an independent manufactured a board, a 100 bus<br />
board, for the Altair, and this was really early, and he called it<br />
the TV Dazzler. It made little squares light up but he could make<br />
lots of them light up in different colors or just a few. It was a<br />
silly program but people said we can do graphics on this.<br />
He eventually developed it into quite an interesting graphics tool,<br />
I guess. People did buy the TV Dazzler for itself but the purpose<br />
was here's a board you could produce graphics, do some graphics. In<br />
any event, that's essentially what Michael Creighton's program did<br />
for the Apple. Not much.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This was not early on.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, it was after the Apple 2 was out.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was probably...<br />
<br />
David: '80.<br />
<br />
Betsy: 1980, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you publish it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. I rejected it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: I'm like we're going to reject an article from Michael Creighton?<br />
<br />
Betsy: We both liked Michael Creighton as an article.<br />
<br />
David: Oh my gosh. But we did. We really did. We had standards.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Later on, though, he wrote something. It was better. It wasn't<br />
great. He did write something better and we did accept it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Orson Scott Card wrote for Compute, I think. I don't know if he was<br />
Orson Scott Card at that point, but [inaudible 00:30:00] .<br />
<br />
David: We've crossed paths with some people.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [inaudible 00:30:09] was actually very nice<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, 6 foot 8, big guy. He was very nice. Unfortunately, he died.<br />
On the other end of things, early on, we really were...this was<br />
probably even before Betsy got in...kind of in the small press<br />
underground publishing movement as much as in the legitimate big<br />
magazines, because that's kind of where I started.<br />
<br />
Betsy: When I came, we had just published the first sleek, coated paper<br />
magazine and coated stock. In October 1978, I believe, that was<br />
published. That was the first of the coated stock. That was kind of<br />
the bridge to legitimacy.<br />
<br />
David: For the first two years, [inaudible 00:31:09] news print and I had<br />
a little tie in with some of the small press people. I was learning<br />
about publishing from small press review, I got to know some of the<br />
people who were doing successful publishing. A lot of them were<br />
magazines and comics out of San Francisco.<br />
So I got to know a little bit [inaudible 00:31:46] and Gilbert<br />
Shelton and Sherry Flannigan, and some of those early, Bobby<br />
London. So anyway, one ad we ran real early on was an adaptation of<br />
Renee and Robert Crompton. Go ahead and change my thing to creative<br />
computing. Go for it. Sherry Flannigan she did a comic strip called<br />
Tronch and Bonnie, Tronch was a little dog and Bonnie was a little<br />
girl and they occasionally got mixed up with a robot dog.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there some sort of falling out with that person?<br />
<br />
David: With Sherry? No. I'm still friends with her on Facebook. They had a<br />
major, major problem, she was involved with Gary Hallgrin and I<br />
forget who the publisher was, McNeil, Bobby London. They were the<br />
Air Pirates funniest group that Disney took to task, that caused<br />
the death of a lot of publishing in the underground comics<br />
movement.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I don't understand.<br />
<br />
David: Air Pirates were funny, they were just looking for trouble. They<br />
had Disney characters flying planes and getting into all kinds of<br />
trouble and getting into problems that Disney characters never<br />
would have done, sexual problems as well as just acting badly.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Disney just said, "We can't put up with this." It was an<br />
interesting case, because was it a copyright violation, not really<br />
because they were character look-a-likes, but they weren't calling<br />
them Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck but they looked the same or very<br />
similar. But, it was a landmark case in underground comics, it<br />
caused a lot of them to pull back, a lot on the satire and stuff<br />
that they were publishing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I asked about Sherry because a number of years ago when I had first<br />
put the best of [inaudible 00:34:29] on my website, then after a<br />
while I got an email saying, "Look, you have to take this<br />
[inaudible 00:34:37] ." I would copyright all, it was just like<br />
waving arms. So I took it down but it was, I thought, maybe it<br />
was...<br />
<br />
David: Well that whole copyright trademark thing, there interpretation<br />
that really, really strict...everything that goes on the Internet<br />
is a public domain. Well, that is not really true either. Are you<br />
making money from copyrighted material? If you are then that's a<br />
pretty clear violation. Are you affecting the copyright owners<br />
ability to make money with it? That's a violation.<br />
I'm kind of in this right now with Uruguay and TinTin, those books<br />
have inspired a lot of people to make parodies and fake TinTin<br />
covers. TinTin at the beach, places TinTin wouldn't normally go.<br />
Well is it affecting the sales of TinTin books, or is it actually<br />
increasingly them?<br />
<br />
Casterman, who owns and [inaudible 00:36:07] owns the TinTin<br />
copyrights. They are really going after some of these people, but<br />
I'm not sure that they have a really good case. So some people take<br />
everything off and don't want nothing on the website. And others<br />
are saying, "Hey, this is legitimate." I have collected a lot of<br />
those covers, and put them up on a website.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I guess you'll find out soon enough.<br />
<br />
David: I will find out, soon enough.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They may not be right legally, but how hard do you want to fight<br />
it.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: I think that they have to demonstrate that it's hurting them in<br />
some way. One last thing, from the question you asked yesterday,<br />
back to the money issue, when I sold the magazine, right at that<br />
time I took 15 percent of what I had received, and donated it to<br />
charities. I have in a sense signed on, although not as an official<br />
signee to the Gates-Buffet initiative to give away half of my<br />
wealth, while I am alive.<br />
At one point in time you can compute that, I have already given<br />
away more than I have received for Creative Computing to Charity.<br />
Of course, it had grown a little bit and we made reasonably decent<br />
investments and that is why it continued to grow. But, I'm really<br />
committed to doing that. My kids are not going to inherit it all.<br />
That's just the way it is, that is the way I believe. Put my money<br />
where my heart is. Anyway,<br />
<br />
Kevin: Other question is, you said something yesterday, I should follow up<br />
that one. You said something about stealing Basic.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well there was this big thing. Just the night before last, at this<br />
dinner we went to, where all the people who were at the first MITS<br />
conference and they referred to the letter that Bill Gates wrote.<br />
<br />
Kevin: "Why are you stealing my software?"<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well exactly. That was just a reference to that Bill Gates, which<br />
had just been brought back to my memory by that. People were<br />
telling stories at this. Instead of having an after dinner speaker<br />
they were just passing the mic around and people were talking about<br />
incidents and things from the past.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you get to sell the story to this group of...?<br />
<br />
David: Not really, I was just followed up on something [inaudible<br />
00:39:24] .<br />
<br />
Betsy: Some of those stories were really boring.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: Oh yeah, long and boring. It's an interesting thing though, about<br />
basic itself, but it was developed at an educational institution<br />
originally by Kemeny and Kurtz at Dartmouth. And they, either<br />
deliberately or because they had gotten a lot of grant money from<br />
General Electric in the early time sharing systems, they basically<br />
let anybody use their Basic.<br />
It was developed at Dartmouth but later Honeywell put a system in<br />
at Minnesota or Florida or someplace else. They could use Basic,<br />
they could have a no license fee or anything. That made Basic a<br />
universal language that was available, at least that version of<br />
Basic. If you write a different version of Basic, where does that<br />
fall? These are some sort of violation and you need some<br />
permission. And basically Kemeny and Kurtz said, "No, you don't."<br />
And they allowed Basic to be used and developed by others.<br />
<br />
Digital Equipment, at the same time, maybe even earlier, but<br />
roughly the same time, had developed also an interactive language<br />
called Focal. And Focal in many regards was more efficient than<br />
Basic, because they were running it on many computer and there was<br />
less memory to work with. On the other hand, and this was true<br />
Digital...as time went on, they said, "No, nobody can use Focal. We<br />
are not going to let, especially those people [inaudible 00:41:59]<br />
." But any place else, nobody could use Focal.<br />
<br />
I think it wound up with a situation like Sony and Betamax. Sony<br />
saying, "Betamax is ours and it is a better format that VHS," which<br />
it was. But then, JVC saying, "We have VHS and Toshiba. Hey do you<br />
want to use it? Fine, we'll license it to you for next to nothing."<br />
<br />
Kevin: You think Focal could have been Basic.<br />
<br />
David: I think it could have been very big. I think it could there could<br />
have been very serious competition between the two languages, but<br />
by Digital limiting it only to their own computers and specifically<br />
to their mini computers, not even the big mainframes, it really<br />
limited the spread of Focal. In fact, it forced me to go out to the<br />
developers and people in educational institutions they wanted<br />
Basic.<br />
There were few schools and colleges in Boston area, near DEC that<br />
were OK with Focal. But stuff was getting published by Minnesota<br />
Educational Computer Consortium and others in Basic, [inaudible<br />
00:43:32] computer project. So they wanted Basic. [laughs] I had to<br />
go on. I hired one group, actually it turned out to be just an<br />
individual guy in Brooklyn that developed a Basic for 4KPDP8. Well<br />
Basic took 3.5K, I gave you 500 words, 512 bit not even the 16 bit,<br />
at least get 2 bits per...but 500 words the right programs. Wasn't<br />
much.<br />
<br />
So that forced Lunar Lander and [inaudible 00:44:15] and some of<br />
those programs actually. Some of them I imported over from Focal<br />
into Basic. And then we had a machine that had 8K. We had a<br />
different version of Basic because Hewlett Packard had a machine<br />
that read cards, mark sense cards. We had to have a different<br />
version of basic for that. Then we had a timeshare Basic. We had<br />
six versions of Basic, five actually on the PDP8 family. It was<br />
absurd, it was crazy, but we had to do it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I was going to ask you, the process of like...you started<br />
saying...you interrupted yourself. You said, "People would submit<br />
articles and then..." I don't know what you were going to say next.<br />
But [inaudible 00:45:08] that I wanted to ask you like just the<br />
process of how the magazine got made. You got an article was,<br />
somebody just typed up or something and...<br />
<br />
Betsy: You mean the mechanics of the production?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We can receive most of the articles for the magazine came over the<br />
transom. And we would get these articles and our editorial system<br />
would log them in and pass them around to editorial staff. John<br />
Anderson and Russell [inaudible 00:45:42] .<br />
<br />
David: Peter Fee.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Peter Fee.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What does it mean over the transom?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Means they weren't solicited. Somebody in the middle of the night<br />
jumped to know [laughs] or through the mailbox. We put a little<br />
piece of paper on there and the guys would write their opinions.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] That is serious.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Some of the things they said. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Like what? What would they say?<br />
<br />
Betsy: "Don't quit your day job." [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: And then they had the rubber stamp.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Somebody found a stamp. Everything that we had was used, including<br />
our desk and everything. And somebody found, at the back of the<br />
desk, a stamp. It said San Marcos on it. This was like the ultimate<br />
insult. [laughs] San Marcos, like you know, "Get out of here."<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Send it to San Marcos?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Send it to San Marcos, wherever that was. Ultimately, I would make<br />
the final decision whether we were going to publish this or not.<br />
Once we were well established, the vast majority of them went back.<br />
We never returned manuscripts. And they would come with piles of<br />
code. A lot of them were programs and, we would decide and the<br />
editorial assistants job to notify the person. Then we bought all<br />
rights, didn't we?<br />
<br />
David: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
Betsy: North American Serial rights, that's what we bought for everything.<br />
Then they would go into a cube. Sometimes we would say something,<br />
"Oh, this is going to go really well with this educational<br />
institute that we're doing in June," Like that one is for June or<br />
just put it in the queue and we will see when it comes or rises to<br />
the top or whatever.<br />
The more technical editors like, John Anderson, he was our best guy<br />
ever. They would go through the code and make sure the code worked,<br />
and I would edit them for content and correct them.<br />
<br />
David: For English and Grammar.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, with a pen and pencil. Then they would go to our typesetter.<br />
Typesetter would correct them. And then they would come back, and I<br />
think, our lower level editorial assistant would proofread them,<br />
but proofread a lot of them too. When they came out typesetter, it<br />
was on a smooth shiny paper.<br />
<br />
David: Photographic paper.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And then, if they had screenshots or anything the art department<br />
would make them into photo stats or [inaudible 00:49:02] . And then<br />
when it was time for them to go to press they would put them on<br />
boards, pieces of cardboard, white paper...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So you paste up?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, they do the paste up and put it on there.<br />
<br />
David: The boards were using non reproducing blue on its photograph. They<br />
had different outlines, blue defined columns, both two and three<br />
column pages and upper limits and page numbers and all that kind of<br />
stuff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: We were still doing it on [inaudible 00:49:43] newspaper in 1990.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well that's exactly it, so you know what we're talking about. And<br />
then once you get it all together and then again somebody has got<br />
to read it to make sure there is no lines left out, particularly of<br />
the programs. Make sure that those all still make sense. There were<br />
many cases where line got left out or artists cuts off a things and<br />
realizes, "Oh, I mean to cut it short." And that whole line<br />
disappears and then you send it off to be printed and all the<br />
subscribers get a little upset because Startrek doesn't run.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: So that sort of thing happened frequently or often?<br />
<br />
David: With typeset material, not much at all. But with program listings,<br />
program listings were really tough. Because you would have people<br />
that would submit something, and they'd have a really cheap, low-<br />
end dot matrix printer. And we always encouraged people, if you're<br />
going to submit a program, submit it in some machine-readable form.<br />
So we don't want to type them all in to make sure they work. Even<br />
though our readers are going to have to, but we don't want to have<br />
to do that. So send us. But even so, we might then print it off on<br />
one of our slightly higher end printers. But I'll tell you what,<br />
you have page breaks and everything else. And the Art department<br />
didn't have a clue about programs and stuff. The program would get<br />
stated down. We weren't using the full sized type for program<br />
listings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. At that point we hadn't the ability to make them fit.<br />
<br />
David: That's where the most common place that you'd lose a line or<br />
something. It would get photographed, and when it's coming out of a<br />
line printer, you might have one or two lines on the following<br />
page. "Oh, we forgot that."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Personally, I know it said so much about magazine that when it<br />
continued, there were just sometimes a handwritten area going,<br />
"Continued over here." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Oh, absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was a early.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It wasn't professional, and that was awesome. It was just like,<br />
"OK."<br />
<br />
Betsy: Then what we would do, we would request when we...we would solicit<br />
articles. Like if there was a new Apple peripheral that we wanted<br />
to review, we'd get the product. Then a lot of times, our own guys<br />
wanted to review the stuff, but if it was something that we didn't<br />
have time for, or that was better suited to one of our freelancers,<br />
we would send it out and ask for a review of it.<br />
A lot of reviews came in over the transom too, but we tried to be<br />
careful of those, that they were not either trying to justify their<br />
own purchase of whatever it was or get even with the publisher for<br />
producing it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Or written by the... [crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: That really wasn't an issue at the time, it was a more innocent<br />
time. That really didn't happen much, but it was, sometimes, people<br />
would get a product they didn't care for and totally bash it, then<br />
we have to go and figure out is it really that bad. We tend to not<br />
produce seriously negative...if it was a really bad product we just<br />
ignored it.<br />
<br />
David: We tried to be objective with reviews, but before I got into the<br />
computer field at all I was in market research. There are a number<br />
of biases, too, that really overwhelmingly affect all kinds of<br />
market research polls or surveys. One is that people think they're<br />
better than they are. For example, if we were doing a poll or a<br />
research study, we'd put a question on basically designed to show<br />
the executives who were using this data that there were some<br />
biases.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He's not talking about Creative Computing.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: No, no. This was way earlier. I'm talking about Proctor and Gamble<br />
products or general foods or that kind of thing. Anyways, the<br />
question we put on was "please rank your driving ability," and we<br />
had from well below average, accident waiting to happen up to Mario<br />
Andretti, Danica Patrick, over there. And you know what, 99 percent<br />
of the population ranked themselves better than the average. Where<br />
is your average then? Its way high.<br />
The other thing, equally pervasive in a sense, is that people<br />
wanted to justify a decision, a purchase decision. In fact, back<br />
the 30s, the slogan for Ford Motor Company was ask a man that owns<br />
one. You ask a man that owns and has made a decision to buy this<br />
car, he's going to say "Yeah, it is the greatest car." So you put<br />
on questions, again, throwaway questions.<br />
<br />
If you had this, or if you were an owner of whatever car it is that<br />
you have. "What do you have now? Would you buy another one?" People<br />
"Oh, yes. This is a great decision. I love this car." I'll tell you<br />
where you can find out, is you look at what percentage of people<br />
that did own that particular car did buy another one? They're<br />
always way lower than they those that say they would buy another<br />
one. It gets more pronounced with higher prices.<br />
<br />
If you've made a decision to buy a high-priced car, you're going to<br />
think, "I'll tell you what. This Land Rover was the best car I have<br />
ever bought." 78 percent of people might say, "I'm going to buy<br />
another one." About 15 percent of the people actually do.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So [inaudible 00:56:49] magazine because people want to justify a<br />
review.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. That's exactly right. And as Betsy said, it could go the<br />
other way, too. "I think I'm getting screwed here with this product<br />
and I'm going to knock it." When you get reviews, in essence, over<br />
the transom, they're either justifying, "This was really wonderful.<br />
I made a great decision buying this particular product," or "I hate<br />
it." It's hard to know whether the review was really objective and<br />
realistic.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you ever push-back from advertisers?<br />
<br />
David: All the time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Can you tell me?<br />
<br />
Betsy: We would feel the pushback from our ad sales people. They would say<br />
"So and so is annoyed with you because you didn't put it." We very<br />
rarely put anybody's totally negative reviews, but we tried to be<br />
objective, and not every product is perfect. Almost every product<br />
is going to have some negative feature.<br />
We would put those in and the advertisers would then go to their ad<br />
rep and complain. Then the ad rep would come to us and say, "Why<br />
are you doing this? These people are mad. I have to sell them ads."<br />
We would just say "Separation of church and State. You are<br />
advertising in this magazine because it's a credible magazine, and<br />
if we let you push us around, it won't be credible anymore, and<br />
then it will reflect on your ad."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you remember anyone ever pulling ads [inaudible 00:58:39] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't, offhand. Do you?<br />
<br />
David: No, but I can tell you the opposite. There were a couple of<br />
magazines that almost ran manufactured press releases as product<br />
reviews. They did get more advertising than we did from some<br />
manufacturers that liked that. I hate to name names, but Compute<br />
Magazine. I don't think you'll find any negative reviews in Compute<br />
Magazine. Everything was the greatest thing since sliced bread.<br />
Personal Computing, similar, very positive. "Gee whiz" reviews on<br />
almost all the things that they saw. It just isn't that way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You have talked about [inaudible 00:59:49] . We've talked briefly<br />
at least about the other magazines. Sync, the one about Timex<br />
Sinclair. I understand the allure of publishing a magazine geared<br />
to a specific system, but why did you pick Timex Sinclair? [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Probably two reasons. One is that we had more of a presence in<br />
England than most of the other magazines.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Still do.<br />
<br />
David: We had a very early agreement with David Tebbet, who was the co-<br />
publisher of Personal Computer, something-or-other. It might have<br />
been Personal Computer World. Yes, it was.<br />
<br />
Betsy Ahi: Yes it was Personal Computer World, and when PC world started they<br />
had to call it PC World because there was already a Personal<br />
Computer World in England.<br />
<br />
David: And we had an agreement that they would reprint materials from<br />
Creative Computing, which they did for a while but then they<br />
developed their own in-house capabilities and there was enough<br />
differences. We went to England and very early on had an agent in<br />
England that we could take subscriptions.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A housewife who kept her back issues in her spare bathroom.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we still know her. Hazel Greaves, Hazy. Anyway, so we were<br />
getting enough subscriptions from England. We were sending over, I<br />
don't know how they packaged them up, but they call them Mbags, M-<br />
bags, mail bags basically of magazines, then we mail them from<br />
England. So I had more of our connection with British market than<br />
probably any of the other magazines, we definitely did.<br />
And so I get to know Clarkson Clair and what's going on over there.<br />
And then when they bring over the computer to this country and<br />
Timex, my God, big outfit. They were going to market it. By that<br />
time you know, there was no point starting a [inaudible 01:02:25]<br />
magazine or an entire magazine. They were, Or Apple, they were<br />
already existed. So maybe this is going to be the next big one. We<br />
will be right there when they start and we were.<br />
<br />
Timex actually put, what we had simple, simple sink or something<br />
but it was in the package with the computer. So that was one way of<br />
getting our subscriber base and we couldn't possibly afford to<br />
advertise and do direct mailings for magazine like that. But they<br />
were in essence helping us go on. So that's why it is pretty<br />
successful actually. Often, we were making money on the magazine<br />
mainly because we didn't have to promote it.<br />
<br />
If we had to get subscriptions, we could not have possibly made it<br />
work. There wasn't enough advertising really. I don't know what the<br />
issue here was, but it was not as good as we would have liked it.<br />
The magazine would have been tiny if we maintained the same<br />
advertising to edit ratio we would have liked. But we didn't lose<br />
money out of it but we didn't make anything out of it either. I<br />
think it was a breakeven proposition.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Microsystems. [inaudible 01:04:09] .<br />
<br />
David: I said there was a lot of early development in New Jersey and there<br />
was a guy named Saul Libes, you will find him probably, [laughs]<br />
who was the first president of the Amature Computer Group in New<br />
Jersey. He was a Professor at [inaudible 01:04:43] College and he<br />
felt that Byte magazine started out fine but then they were<br />
focusing more on assembled hardware and things that were already<br />
made.<br />
So he wanted to get down on really lower level of do it yourself,<br />
build it yourself. Microsystems was more like Byte was in the very<br />
beginning, focusing on circuit diagram, this was logic in PC's and<br />
everything.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There first name was S100, Microsystems<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, S100 perhaps then it became Microsystems in '78 or '79. When<br />
some of the others came out they started [inaudible 01:05:45] 6800<br />
and 68,000 chips from Motorola. But I would say it was a really<br />
techy magazine and it was one that I think probably killed that one<br />
off.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was dead before [inaudible 01:06:05] . [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: It might have been. I don't know, but it was...<br />
<br />
Betsy: S100 bus did not survive and to the [inaudible 01:06:12] .<br />
<br />
David: It was dead before as there was these eras and the do it yourself<br />
S100 era,that was '75 to '78. Then it kind of had a downward spiral<br />
of two or three years and it was gone. Well, maybe it wasn't gone<br />
but it wasn't the same. And so Microsystems was tuned into that and<br />
they were running hardcore stuff.<br />
And the reason that Saul...we reach an agreement with him to<br />
publish it, is basically he didn't have any real magazine<br />
background. We thought we could do something with it. It turned out<br />
not to be a good fit bit we published it for a while. I don't know<br />
if we made money or lost money on that. Probably it didn't make<br />
anything. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Small business computers or computing.<br />
<br />
David: What?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Small business computers? Who do we buy that from? I can't even<br />
remember. You can't even remember that we had it, I can tell by the<br />
look on your face<br />
<br />
David: I can<br />
<br />
Betsy: That one of my brothers...my brother was a publisher remember?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I don't know who or where we got it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That just fall into grave or...?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Eventually, but that we post it for a while. I think is something<br />
that somebody basically left on our door step.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think it was kind of like a puppy on the... [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: I think it came with your brother.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, because my brother wasn't into publishing until after clearing<br />
college.<br />
<br />
David: It sounded like a good idea at the time.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think we saw a future in business computing<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we did and unfortunately that was one word as if they just<br />
want...I mentioned yesterday that they wanted to really shift the<br />
focus of Creative Computing away from home and broaden out and<br />
shifted into the small business market. And just did not, it was an<br />
uncomfortable fit. We would've been better to have a separate<br />
magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember where we got Small Business Computing from or<br />
where it went.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know, either.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But I know that obviously it wasn't a huge acquisition.<br />
<br />
David: It was a footnote.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A footnote in the story. [laughs]<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Actually, a bigger acquisition was earlier and that was ROM<br />
Magazine. Rom was published by who? (ED: not the Atari-related<br />
magazine of the early 1980s.)<br />
<br />
Betsy: Erik Sandberg-Diment.<br />
<br />
David: Right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: D-I-M-E-N-T.<br />
<br />
David: Connecticut. He did a nice job with the magazine, very nice job<br />
with it. Published nine issues and a little different focus than<br />
Creative but it really overlapped us very nicely. He had more<br />
graphic stuff. In fact, it was through him that I got to know<br />
George Baker and some of the people up there. The other guy that<br />
did the pixelated blocks photos. You've seen those.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The Einstein.<br />
<br />
David: [crosstalk] The Lincoln with block pics.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Block pics.<br />
<br />
David: Block pics. OK, he and George Baker sort of came as a package with<br />
Rom, they knew of each other. We actually, I would say, four or<br />
five issues, ran Rom as a whole separate section and even set it on<br />
the cover of Creative Computing and Rom. Then it became evident...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think that was because he had a whole other editorial kicking<br />
around. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We bought.<br />
<br />
David: Could be. And then we would just merge it in completely, but that<br />
was a very good fit. It brought us more editorial than it did<br />
subscribers. They did not have a big subscriber base, but it was a<br />
nice marriage in a sense.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Video and Arcade Games only published I think four issues.<br />
<br />
David: Three.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Three?<br />
<br />
David: Actually, three but if you've got a hold of the third one, you're<br />
doing well. I think Ziff cut that off after two real issues got<br />
mailed out. We did a third one but it wasn't sent out to<br />
subscribers.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My website only has two issues.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. There were only two that really were distributed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So I have...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: A goal. [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, if you can get a hold of the third one. [laughter] I don't<br />
even have that. There's a same thing on Tarry-on. There were three<br />
issues of Tarry-on that I did not keep the third issue. Oh, man.<br />
Shoot me.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: But Video and Arcade Games, there were at least five or six other<br />
magazines focusing on that. Talk about magazines that were running<br />
non-objective manufacture-provided reviews, all the others were. I,<br />
maybe, convinced myself and some people at Davis that there was a<br />
need for really objective...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ziff? Did Ziff do that?<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Were we with Ziff when we did that?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah. That was a late one. So we said, let's...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Continue it through.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, that was definitely. Let's do it. But again...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not only that but it was going to be fun.<br />
<br />
David: It was going to be a lot of fun. [laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: So why did it fail?<br />
<br />
David: OK, again you got to look at the eras and what was happening.<br />
Arcade games then really were on the decline. Video arcades where<br />
you go in and pop a quarter in, because there was so much more<br />
capability in the home computers and the [inaudible 01:12:55] and<br />
the Mattel and the different home systems. They could do all now,<br />
not as much, but you get a pretty darned good game that you could<br />
take home with you and not have to pop a quarter in the slot every<br />
time you play.<br />
So arcade games were kind of on the downward spiral, so that<br />
eliminated a lot of potential advertising. We weren't going to get<br />
any advertising from Nameco and all of the producers of the arcade<br />
games, which was, "Hey, it is advertising along with..." And the<br />
other home producers of the game, there were four or five magazines<br />
already that they were pouring money into. They didn't really want<br />
another one.<br />
<br />
So it was advertising that or just lack of advertising that killed<br />
that off. We just couldn't get it. I think there was still a need<br />
for what we had sort of in a sense proposed to do of objectively<br />
reviewing games and secondly, we're telling people how to play<br />
them.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, it was strategies.<br />
<br />
David: Strategies. It was advertising that we just didn't have, couldn't<br />
get.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:14:28] Atari explored and Atari I think we've covered<br />
pretty well.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Military vehicles, which we talked about.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] Yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So the other magazines, Byte and [inaudible 01:14:45] , was it<br />
rivalry? Was it friendly competition?<br />
<br />
David: Byte, we were in bed together. Not in bed together, but we<br />
published the best of Byte. Creative Computing did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: For awhile.<br />
<br />
David: Well, just one.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. That wasn't that friendly a rivalry. It wasn't that friendly<br />
after awhile.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't friendly once they sold to McGraw Hill, and they sold<br />
early. Then everything was off. We did some joint promotions with<br />
Byte for hardware creative software. We ran the ads for each other<br />
for a short time.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's when McGraw Hill cutoff.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] In a heartbeat. No more of that.<br />
<br />
David: We felt that basically we weren't even competing for the same<br />
advertisers. Just a few, but not really. Certainly, we were not in<br />
direct competition at all with Byte. So that was just kind of all<br />
in the same place and you're going in a hardware direction, we're<br />
going on the software.<br />
When Wayne Green threw this intrigue with his wife and everything<br />
else, lost Byte Magazine. He was fit to be tied. "I'm going to kill<br />
them!" and he started Kilobyte. It wasn't killable. It was Kilobyte<br />
for I don't know how many issues.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not many.<br />
<br />
David: 1000 bytes. [laughter] and a kilobyte, it had a dual meaning there.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: That was a ferocious and very nasty. Oh, horrible rivalry. Somebody<br />
early on forced him not to use the name byte at all.<br />
<br />
Betsy: So it was byte.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: So they changed it to Kilobaud.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Which didn't mean anything.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: No.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So did you have a relationship with Wayne?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Nobody had a relationship with... [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Nobody really had a relationship. I knew him, of course. He was<br />
going his own way. Now the one area actually where we got into more<br />
competition with him than in the magazine itself, because again, he<br />
was trying to be like Byte, hardware oriented and he published 73<br />
magazines so he was basically focusing on the ham radio people, the<br />
do it yourselfers and so on. But they started a software division.<br />
It was pretty good. They had a lot of the same types of software<br />
that we did on cassette tape.<br />
In any event, we really had more of a head to head rivalry on the<br />
software than in the magazine publishing. We never really had<br />
anything to do with the magazine products or books. They also<br />
published some books but more like the magazine hardware type of<br />
thing. We weren't quite as selective, but our book publishing we<br />
did get into things that weren't in the magazine. We published<br />
books with more of a hardware orientation. We had a little broader<br />
line of books than the type of things that we had in the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I don't know if you want to open this can of worms, but you said to<br />
me in an email, "You couldn't find two people whose vision,<br />
philosophy, ethics, and view of business and life was further apart<br />
than Wayne and I." Can you elaborate on that? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was just basically unpleasant, is my take on him. I didn't know<br />
him that well but it was just sort of like he had a chip on his<br />
shoulder and was daring you to knock it off. Wouldn't you say?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You knew him before I did but by the time I arrived on the scene<br />
that was just sort of the general industry perception of him, I<br />
think. It was just stay away from him, leave him alone, he's not<br />
very nice.<br />
<br />
David: Well, one other thing, which we sort of touched on a couple of<br />
times, I'm very trusting. [laughter] Overly so, according to my ex-<br />
wife and I think there would be a couple of examples. Wayne would<br />
walk out of that door, boy, out of sight, 'you're going to do<br />
something to screw him' is what his view would be. He did not trust<br />
anybody.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] And least of all, his ex wife.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: It's the old saying, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean<br />
that somebody isn't out to get you." He thought everyone was out to<br />
get him, everybody. So we were totally philosophically different.<br />
Our ways of doing business were different. I shake hands with you,<br />
we have an agreement. You don't shake hands with Wayne.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't think his employees were ever happy either.<br />
<br />
David: Oh!<br />
<br />
Betsy: You talked to them and it shows. He didn't have like a great...<br />
<br />
David: Rapport.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well it was not. The culture of his organization I don't think was<br />
particularly, I think it was probably permeated with this lack of<br />
trust.<br />
<br />
David: Well, one thing, we had fun. We really did have fun at Creative<br />
Computing. Perhaps some of the editorial staff, too much. There was<br />
one point where Betsy had to away their...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well they were all young guys. Some of them even still in high<br />
school, they would play games for hours and hours and hours, long<br />
after the reviews were done. It was one, self-contained thing that<br />
played football, and they played it for hours. I had to take it<br />
away from them. Like "don't make me be your mother"<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there any drug culture at all? If you read [inaudible 01:22:17]<br />
and he was cocaine and high everyday and popped...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not that we knew of. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: The East coast was quite different.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No there was nothing, really. I don't think so. In fact, my client<br />
John Anderson and Peter Fee, they were actually kind of protective<br />
of me in a lot of ways. I can remember being in John's office and<br />
they were talking about a movie or something like that. John said,<br />
"No, you wouldn't like this movie, don't go to this movie." That<br />
kind of thing, they were funny guys. They just kept laughing. David<br />
Lubar. They were free spirits but they were very funny, talented<br />
guys.<br />
<br />
David: He is coming out with a line of children's books, weird, weird<br />
stuff. The last one, something about the lawn mower weenies. He has<br />
a line of 6 or 8, and they're all little short stories. Some of<br />
them were adaptations of stuff that almost got published in<br />
Creative Computing, probably some of them did. Lubar is a funny<br />
guy. When he left and went to work for one of the video gaming<br />
companies, his first big successful game was "Worm Wars." You were<br />
like, "Worm Wars?" [laughs]<br />
Other people are fighting real serious warrior and you are fighting<br />
with worms. We just had a different kind of culture, a lot of fun.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Jonny Anderson went to work for A+ in San Francisco. He was one<br />
of the five people killed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1986.<br />
He was in a car and a piece of the building fell on the car. He was<br />
a really funny guy.<br />
<br />
David: We did not have a serious business culture.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, we had this great big room with a bunch of tables set up around<br />
the edges, in the middle. It was kind of like that, nowhere near as<br />
neat.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I will clean that up for you.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] Just tangles of wires, and we had to have one of every<br />
kind of computer so we can test all the software, and this one<br />
would be running this kind of peripheral, and it was like a young<br />
guys dream job.<br />
<br />
David: You commented yesterday about how we had a bunch of high school,<br />
not quite, but still...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I said that they were in their early 20s but they basically had the<br />
maturity of high school students, they needed a little bit of<br />
mothering. But I wasn't that myself. They were just really nice<br />
guys, we did a good job hiring those kids.<br />
<br />
David: When you talk about the Atari cultures and some of the others,<br />
where every Friday some of these companies have parties, that kind<br />
of thing. We had an annual party, a picnic. We didn't need weekly<br />
parties and stuff to let you have fun because that stuff was going<br />
on every day, not really partying but playing the games and<br />
bantering and everything else.<br />
As they say, at Washington, a real efficient business culture.<br />
Heck, I didn't work for Digital Equipment, which was still a pretty<br />
relaxed place, but AT&T which was anything but. This is as far away<br />
from that kind of corporate culture as you can get, but it worked.<br />
Didn't make a lot of money, but it worked.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:26:58]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. And I think they appreciated it because they weren't making<br />
tons of money either, but they were having a lot of fun. They<br />
enjoyed going to work, they really enjoyed it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Speaking of Kindle, I've done it but haven't told anybody yet that<br />
best of Creative Computing too is now available on Kindle. And I<br />
have been working backwards. [crosstalk] I just had it on sale.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I haven't publicized it yet for sale.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They won't let you do. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah, I think they will have two.<br />
<br />
David: Did you do that through Amazon? How do you convert is to Kindle?<br />
I scan them and then I do CRM and I use Elance or utilize some<br />
service in India that converts it back to ASCII, and then they<br />
convert it into an E-book from there. It's a lot of work, I want it<br />
done well, and I want it to be super awesome. And they just<br />
[inaudible 01:28:40] , like we were talking about before.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Outsourcing and stuff. But I can do it myself but that would take<br />
way too long. So I just try to do the quality control [inaudible<br />
01:28:49] . It's not perfect but better than nothing.<br />
<br />
David: I have reached the point where with my Dodge restoration book, that<br />
yes, many of the borders around the pictures are terrible, they're<br />
hand drawn and so on. But I'm not going to bother to re-do that, I<br />
just want take the book, get it into some sort of machine readable<br />
format, PDF or something. [inaudible 01:29:24] somebody that can...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah, I can get you off with that. We can then figure it out.<br />
<br />
David: I found one extra one that I can cut up.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That will help a lot. [inaudible 01:29:37] . If you want to sell a<br />
PDF of it, that would be up in couple of day. That's easy, but a<br />
searchable Kindle version that takes longer.<br />
<br />
David: I don't want a Kindle version because people want to print out<br />
something that they can...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Take out to the garage<br />
<br />
David: When people slide under the vehicle they have it there, "Oh, OK<br />
this is what I should be looking for."<br />
<br />
Kevin: If you scan it and upload it to Amazon, even create space from<br />
[inaudible 01:30:06] company, then there could actually be another<br />
book, that looks pretty identical to the first one. We will figure<br />
out.<br />
Do you [inaudible 01:30:23] ? But are you familiar with...?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Are there any?<br />
<br />
Kevin: There are but they are very different than Creative.<br />
<br />
David: Somebody out there said, "What did you read today?" The only<br />
magazines that I will occasionally pick up in the computer field<br />
are mostly from England, Internet magazines, well there are<br />
several, which is sort of interesting that the dominant Internet<br />
magazines come from England, but they do.<br />
If I want to do something, and I haven't lately, but I wanted to<br />
get into doing something different or interactive or something with<br />
my website. I'd pick up one of those magazines and kind of have<br />
same kind of thing that Creative used to publish. Here is a code to<br />
do it in Pearl or HTML, whatever.<br />
<br />
I converted all of my website, quite a while ago, to XHTML from old<br />
HTML. I did not like any of the programs that generate web pages,<br />
mainly because...Well, today its probably OK, but I felt that<br />
earlier on, they were very inefficient. You'd have this much code<br />
for something and XHTML would write it in five lines.<br />
<br />
My old-fashioned [inaudible 01:32:23] said, "You know what, the<br />
interpreter or compiler or whatever, has to go through a lot of<br />
that just to pick out what is going to be displayed." My web pages<br />
are very compact and short. They are all XHTML, none of that is<br />
extra [inaudible 01:32:41] style pages and everything else.<br />
<br />
Anyway, so that's what I'll pick up a magazine for. I'm was doing a<br />
little bit of programming in Pearl and then I said, "No. You know<br />
what, I can get routines that I can download and I don't have to<br />
learn it myself. I learned enough to know that I don't want your<br />
Pearl program." [laughs] Or what is the other one? I don't know.<br />
I'm right at the point now where I'm wanting to do some more things<br />
that I can't, so I'll probably purchase some more computer<br />
magazines and learn about it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Has anyone talked to you about the purchase of PC by Davis?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is a big story.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: She was involved.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was involved. There was a magazine called PC. I was in San<br />
Francisco.<br />
<br />
Kevin: PC magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: PC Magazine, right. And, there was a guy named Tony Gold and there<br />
was somebody else that I can't remember. There was Tony Gold and<br />
this Mr. X started this magazine and they hired...David Banell will<br />
probably tell you all, I don't know all the details but I'm sure he<br />
has it engraved in his brain.<br />
They hired David Banell to run it and I guess several other people,<br />
and my understanding is, that they told them they were going to<br />
give them a piece of the action, they weren't going to pay them<br />
very much but you're all part owners and everything, but nobody<br />
ever wrote it down.<br />
<br />
So when Ziff Davis approached Tony Gold and Mr. X and wanted to buy<br />
the magazine, and the guys said, "Oh yeah, sure," and they sold it<br />
to him and all these people that were working for them said, "Well,<br />
what about us. We're part owners too." But there was no proof of<br />
it. So Ziff bought it, and they were right in the middle, just<br />
about to go to press with an issue and they got word that it had<br />
been purchased by Ziff.<br />
<br />
So David Banell took just about the entire staff and they walked<br />
out and went across town and started PC World. Apparently their<br />
lawyers said, "Don't take anything with you." So they just walked<br />
out and left the offices as they were, and Ziff, who now had a<br />
magazine to get out and no one to do it, sent me out to San<br />
Francisco for a couple of weeks and there was like an editorial<br />
assistant and a couple of freelance writers, were the only people<br />
left.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So this is when you became the interim.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is how I become the editorial director of PC. So I basically<br />
went out there and walked into this office and had to pull together<br />
their issue and get it off to the printer. They had a big dummy on<br />
the wall where everthing...<br />
<br />
Kevin: They lay all the...<br />
<br />
Betsy: They lay all the impositions where all the pages and the stories<br />
were going to go and they moved everything around. [laughs] But<br />
they couldn't resist.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That is awesome.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This one guy, whose name I wish I could remember. Barry Owen,<br />
worked with me, and we were able to get it off to the printer and<br />
then pack everything up and send it back to New York and then they<br />
hired Barry Owen, he moved to New York and he eventually become the<br />
editor, because that was who they had.<br />
I was sort of the editorial director for a while and they said<br />
that, "If you were going to do this, you would have to come to the<br />
city. We are going to really set up an office here and make it<br />
real." And I said, "No, I am not going to drive into the city every<br />
day or take the train or the bus or anything." It was a interesting<br />
story and we were getting much more interesting version of it from<br />
David Barnell, who was there. [laughs]<br />
<br />
And in the mean time, they were all starting up PC World and taking<br />
all of their freelancers and trying to make it as difficult as<br />
possible for PC. That was a big rivalry, obviously.<br />
<br />
David: And then it created a couple of months of problems at creative too,<br />
because my editor was gone. I had really gotten very dependent to<br />
rely on her for so many things. "I got to edit this myself." And<br />
then the whole question mark was, OK if PC magazine, is she can<br />
stay with it. It was a time of uncertainty.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm sure it was a bad career move.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. But PC magazine still exist.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, exactly. I don't know if I would have existed if I had to<br />
commute to New York, that's a nasty commute. Millions of people do<br />
it but, I just didn't want to be one of them. I didn't mean to<br />
interrupt, so back to you.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What are you most proud of, or everything you have done?<br />
<br />
David: OK, that's obviously not a one word answer. Proud is, I am not<br />
crazy about it. I guess the fact that I continued to hear from<br />
people that said, "Hey, I got my start in computing from Basic<br />
computer games or Creative Computing," or something that I had my<br />
hand in, that makes me feel pretty good.<br />
You have a long term, or longer term influence that just what you<br />
do at the time, it's living on. It's not living on forever. Basic<br />
isn't going to live on forever. But I think the idea that having<br />
some positive influence on other people, on their lives, on their<br />
careers, that's a good.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You helped send people into the computer science field.<br />
<br />
David: And you know the specific individual accomplishments. Yeah, I wrote<br />
a couple of programs that are probably in some cases, maybe not the<br />
program but the routines, are still in use. That's minor compared<br />
to having an influence on people and their career and their<br />
outlook, their future. That's way more important. "OK so I wrote a<br />
great algorithm, so what."<br />
<br />
Kevin: And you really think it's the same algorithm that's being used in<br />
Google maps and...<br />
<br />
David: Portions of it, yeah. But that is minor. I look back and I say,<br />
"Almost anything that I wrote in the last 30-40 years, if I were<br />
doing it today, I would have done it a little differently, but I<br />
didn't know then what I know now." So there's no one thing I could<br />
say, "Oh, that was a really great article, or great insight," or<br />
something. Anything can be improved upon.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sure. That's what disappoints me about computer magazines today is<br />
I don't think that it seems like children going to be able to go.<br />
It's not going to motivate anybody to do anything, other than use<br />
Word version 18 or whatever. There's no Basic programs to type<br />
anymore and it's not exciting.<br />
[cross talk]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Well, [inaudible 01:42:31] was mentioning that at breakfast,<br />
oh gosh that was just yesterday.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was yesterday [laughs] .<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] That kids today don't have any feeling about, or I should<br />
say knowledge about the real basics of bits. What is a bit?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: Nobody knows anymore. He wanted to find some little simple piece of<br />
hardware. Really, I guess he has, that every kid when they're in<br />
the 5th or 6th grade will be exposed to this so they'll have some<br />
concept of what bits are all about. Are you ever going to get that<br />
into schools today? No. So anyway, it's just kind of, hopefully<br />
there's been some long term influence.<br />
And what I'm doing now even, which is mainly developing bible<br />
studies for...well, I mostly have guys that have had a drug or<br />
alcohol addiction problem coming to this. They're in a rescue<br />
mission. I'm hoping that these studies can have a little bit of an<br />
influence on the direction of their lives. They're a positive<br />
influence on where they go from here. So it's kind of, people more<br />
than a specific thing or whatever.<br />
<br />
[pause]<br />
<br />
Those are terrible copies.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They are copies. These are from the scans. I was printing scans and<br />
I wasn't trying to make them pretty. Just for my reasons, it was<br />
quick and dirty. I could've bumped the contrast and stuff.<br />
<br />
David: There's Carl.<br />
[pause]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do have anything left, like how many subscribers you had over time?<br />
Is that data around anymore? How many newsstand copies you had? I<br />
assume that is a lot.<br />
<br />
David: OK, maximum, I think we mentioned that. We hit just about a half a<br />
million before Ziff killed it. Then, they gave people a choice of<br />
three magazines that they expected to continue to publish, PC,<br />
Apple's A+, or Mac User.<br />
I'm guessing that most people went with PC. One of the reasons<br />
actually was Ziff's rationale at that point was, PC World had<br />
really grown a lot and the circulation base of PC World and PC were<br />
very close. They were both about a half million. PC might have had<br />
a small lead.<br />
<br />
Then, by killing Creative Computing and rolling all of those<br />
subscribers, there was some overlap. Certainly, there were some<br />
subscribers that got both magazines. You probably had a quarter of<br />
a million additional subscribers into PC. All of the sudden, they<br />
go to advertise, "We've got three-quarters of a million and PC<br />
World only has half a million."<br />
<br />
That was when PC had a huge growth spurt. You know, they started<br />
publishing those telephone-book-thick issues.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I would think that it probably still holds the record for the<br />
largest magazine ever published, whenever the issue was that they<br />
published it, it was their biggest one. Certainly magazines aren't<br />
getting bigger now. They didn't continue to increase in size after<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: Then they started publishing it twice a month. The nudge that the<br />
subscriber base at Creative, gave to PC really, separated them<br />
completely from PC World. They had their reasons.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. This is a chart of the page count of Creative Computing over<br />
its life. It's not a question, I just made a chart. Every December<br />
there's a peak for the big December issue. Right at the end it<br />
just, all of the sudden, stopped.<br />
<br />
David: Well, that's when Ziff had decided to kill it, which was almost a<br />
year before. They basically let us publish for another eight or<br />
nine months after they had made the decision.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was a lot of back and forth. Are they going to kill it? Are<br />
they not going to kill it?<br />
<br />
David: They weren't promoting, no subscription promotion. They were saving<br />
their money. If you don't promote the subscriptions, you're not<br />
going to get them.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is page count.<br />
<br />
David: It was advertising.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:48:59]<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't actually subscriber base didn't drop them. That's cool.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just thought I'd do a comparison, even though that's not really<br />
what I'm doing here. In the beginning, you guys were bimonthly and<br />
they were monthly. I couldn't know how to do it accurately. Their<br />
page count's actually higher, because they were doing twice as<br />
much. I don't have all the data here. You guys tended to publish<br />
larger issues than "Kilobyte?"<br />
<br />
David: It was so dependent upon advertising. You got some magazines, they<br />
would run 80, 90 percent advertising, if they could. In some<br />
special interest fields, you can get away with that, because people<br />
are actually buying the magazine for the advertising, not for the<br />
editorial content.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [inaudible 01:50:02] , a good example.<br />
<br />
David: That's exactly right. Even what the guys that bought Military<br />
Vehicles, they just went over so heavily to...I always believe that<br />
you should have at least one-third editorial content, preferably<br />
more. They dropped down to 20 percent to edit.<br />
<br />
Kevin: There was one issue, the 10th anniversary issue, I don't mean to be<br />
picking on Wayne here. There was this quote he happened to say,<br />
which I thought was really interesting to me, I wanted to get your<br />
take on it. He said, this is in 1984, "A computer system doesn't<br />
really stand a prayer anymore unless there's at least one<br />
dedicated, independent magazine for its users."<br />
<br />
David: Wayne said that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wayne said that. Is that true? At the time, would you have agreed<br />
with that?<br />
<br />
David: In '84? Again, you've got to look at where we were in the cycle at<br />
that point. The cycle was then, there were more computers dying off<br />
than there were new ones being released. Standardization had come<br />
in really. You've got the IBM PC, and everybody's producing a PC<br />
clone. Apple kept going, and Atari, and Commodore attempted to.<br />
If you were to start a computer company at that point, with a new<br />
computer, yeah, you'd need something to give your user base<br />
something to do with it, more than just what the manufacturer was<br />
selling. So, that's probably accurate. What do you think?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, I think it's accurate. That's what people started to expect.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. Another chord of the same issue which we've kind of touched<br />
on from Tom Dwyer. This is in 1984. He's saying, "Computer<br />
magazines used to have personality [laughter] and now they don't."<br />
Now, they really don't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They really don't!<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think they still have personality in form but now it's just<br />
inconsistent.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Who was Tom Dwyer? I don't remember him.<br />
<br />
David: Tom Dwyer? He was at University of Pittsburgh. He came up with all<br />
those neat applications. He and Margo...He had the best basic<br />
primer of anybody, in fact the only one that both Kemeny and Kurtz<br />
endorsed outside of their own material. He had really written some<br />
good Basic books.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm just finishing up here. The Internet says you were born in<br />
1939. Is that right?<br />
<br />
David: Yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Where were you born?<br />
<br />
David: New York, New York.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent.<br />
<br />
David: I was born in the hospital that my father had a hand in designing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Really?<br />
<br />
David: He was an architect up until the Recession. I think he, perhaps,<br />
designed the restrooms but he wasn't the...<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: When were you two married?<br />
<br />
Betsy: 1988. 25 years ago.<br />
<br />
David: June 18, 1988.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What's your last name now?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mine?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ahl.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I tried keeping this professional thing and it was just way too<br />
confusing, since that really wasn't my name anyway. That was my<br />
first husband's name, and then just...this is way too complicated.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My wife kept her maiden name and now she wishes she hadn't. It's<br />
just confusing. It just made sense to do.<br />
<br />
Betsy: If had been my maiden name, I might have, but it really wasn't.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What haven't I asked you that I should have?<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] We kind of were noodling it around last night and said,<br />
"Man, the guy's thorough."<br />
<br />
Betsy: You the most prepared interviewer ever.<br />
<br />
David: I jotted down a couple of notes. Nope.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Got everything?<br />
<br />
David: What's your thinking? Because originally you were talking to me<br />
about covering Wayne's magazines and so on.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My original thought, when I had put no thought into it, was that it<br />
would be half about Wayne's magazine and half about Creative. First<br />
of all, after talking to him, I thought there's not enough to do<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: Did you talk to Wayne?<br />
<br />
Kevin: I talked to Wayne.<br />
<br />
David: Well that's good to know, right? Carl Helmers didn't know if Wayne<br />
was still alive.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He's still alive.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's true. We asked Carl Helmers if Wayne was still alive and he<br />
was [inaudible 01:56:06] .<br />
<br />
David: Actually, there was another guy up there that published a computer<br />
magazine. What the heck was the name of it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Who are you talking about?<br />
<br />
David: Up in New Hampshire, Peterborough. It was one of the earlier would-<br />
be competitors to Datamation. So, it was much earlier.<br />
He was absolutely totally convinced about the Kennedy assassination<br />
and published a computer analysis of all the photos and everything<br />
else. Every single issue of the magazine had this stuff. He and<br />
Wayne were on the same wavelength on that. You ask Wayne about the<br />
conspiracy. [laughs] You'll get an earful.<br />
<br />
Kevin: In answer to your question. First, it was going to be the two, and<br />
then that happened. Also my wife said, "If you're doing two, then<br />
it's going to seem like a compare and contrast thing." That's not<br />
what I want to do.<br />
Now I'm thinking that this will be a project about the earliest<br />
computer magazines, the first computer magazines. That way, I can,<br />
whatever, four or five chapters. One on Creative, and maybe Byte.<br />
I'm meeting with the editor of Byte in a couple of weeks at an<br />
event, maybe Interface Age or one of the other ones.<br />
<br />
David: If you can find Bob Jones, that would be an interesting contrast.<br />
He was Interface Age. He had a different perspective on a lot of<br />
things, and I had a lot of respect for him. He just didn't sell at<br />
the right time. Too bad. Bob Jones was a very serious, good guy.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Who were the other early people? Dr. Dobbs? I don't know what...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, Dr. Dobbs...<br />
<br />
David: Jim Warren! Oh my goodness. That would give you another perspective<br />
altogether.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's, again, the California...<br />
<br />
David: Jim Warren and Bob Albrecht are tied together very closely. They're<br />
both in sort of in the alternative lifestyle. I don't know what<br />
you'd call it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That probably had Friday afternoon pot parties. [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Oh, boy. Did they ever! Yes, yes. Jim also was the one that started<br />
the West Coast computer fairs. He's a very capable guy. Dr. Dobb's<br />
journal was in a sense, well, you've probably seen it. You have,<br />
right? OK, so you know.<br />
That's really low level programming rather than higher languages.<br />
We're talking about machine languages, assembly language,<br />
programming, and there. It was sort of like Microsystems was to<br />
Byte. Microsystems, for the really serious hardware guy. Dr. Dobbs<br />
was for the really serious programmer, compared to Creative which<br />
was for people who just wanted to type something in that would<br />
work.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:59:35] basic right. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Dr. Dobbs. That was a totally different [inaudible 01:59:43]<br />
competitor.<br />
<br />
David: We didn't compete at all. I had a view that we competed at all with<br />
them; they may have thought we did but I didn't think so.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did they even have advertising?<br />
<br />
David: Oh yeah, actually they did, and it kept going for a long time<br />
because it was a small little nitch magazine. But, yeah, Jim Warren<br />
would be an interesting guy, very interesting guy early on. I don't<br />
know about Albert because you say he published more tabloid<br />
newspapers. I don't know if they ever really published any magazine<br />
size thing or not. Probably not, but it would give me a totally<br />
different perspective because they are coming from the west coast,<br />
looser or whatever.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That sounded pretty loose.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah nothing compared to that.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think he was sort of in rebellion when he started working at<br />
Creative Computing because he was coming off of AT&T where he had to<br />
wear a suit to work every day. So the first thing he did was burn<br />
his suits and wear t-shirt and jeans way before anybody was doing<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: I went extremely in the other direction, yeah I did, but who else<br />
real early. Personal computing which I think David Barnell somehow<br />
involved in it at some point in there. Because they moved from the<br />
west coast to New Jersey, they were bought by...who was that? It<br />
was mostly a company that published things like hardware age and<br />
advertiser-driven magazines. What was the name?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, gosh. Begins with an 'H'.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Halshep<br />
<br />
David: No. Anyway, when they brought personal computing...I think Barnell<br />
maybe even started it, and then they moved it to New Jersey, and<br />
then David said "I'm not going to New Jersey. I'm a west coast<br />
guy," or whatever. And then, they changed the whole thing totally.<br />
That's why I said they're one of the ones where they were so<br />
totally advertiser driven. A press release is a product review, as<br />
far as they were concerned.<br />
They had some interesting stuff. They were a competitor only in<br />
name, but also because they got the advertising. "I think I'm going<br />
to advertise." "Oh! We're going to publish a wonderful review! Give<br />
it to us." And so they were early, and they made money. There were<br />
a bunch of flash-in-the-pan magazines that lasted 2 or 3 or maybe 6<br />
issues, but nobody...<br />
<br />
Kevin: But only one in seven made it, so...<br />
<br />
Betsy: One in seven, right?<br />
<br />
David: That's right, exactly. I can't remember the name of some of these<br />
ones, but there was a very successful big magazine that published<br />
all Apple...reviews of Apple stuff. What was that one? Apple by<br />
themselves spawned I'd guess half a dozen magazines.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Inquest, and Insider, and Apple...a bunch of others there.<br />
<br />
David: Right. Actually, there's one that I can't think of the name of, it<br />
turned out, it was bigger and thicker and creative. They were<br />
publishing a lot of stuff, but again, it would all be positive and<br />
so they really killed us on getting advertising. We had been a<br />
publisher of Apple material for a while. Then all these others came<br />
along. That one, whatever it was, was really took a lot of<br />
advertising from us. I'll think about it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You'll remember.<br />
<br />
David: I'll remember some of this. When it all settled out, you came back<br />
down to eight or nine, but the ones we're talking about...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Well, at one point there was 200.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I think that's correct.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You are probably counting newsletters..<br />
<br />
Kevin: Probably industry-specific stuff and niche stuff but still, you<br />
went from one to 200, 10 years ago.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. That's true.</div>Mauryhttps://www.computingpioneers.com/index.php?title=Dave_Ahl_and_Betsy_Ahl&diff=146Dave Ahl and Betsy Ahl2019-09-25T18:29:28Z<p>Maury: clarify ROM</p>
<hr />
<div>This is a transcript of an audio interview. This transcript may contain errors - if you're using this material for research, etc. please verify with the original recorded interview.<br />
<br />
Source: ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast<br />
<br />
Source URL: http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-280-david-and-betsy-ahl-creative-computing-magazine<br />
<br />
Interviewer: Kevin Savetz<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm interested in how you guys got together. Was it some sort of<br />
office romance? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It started before then. I was working at Drew University and I was<br />
dating the computer science professor. He invited Dave...he was a<br />
subscriber to Creative Computing. I can remember being at his house<br />
and picking up a copy of this magazine and thinking, "Creative<br />
Computing," and laughing. "What kind of a title is that?"<br />
He invited Dave to come speak to one of his classes. While he was<br />
there, he said, "I should stop by your placement office. We're<br />
starting to expand. I'm looking for some people." Right? Am I<br />
getting this right? I was looking for other opportunities, so I<br />
sent him my resume. Many months later, he hired me.<br />
<br />
David: She still smarts about that.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: I interviewed her in, I don't know, April or so.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You interviewed me on April 17th and you did not hire me until<br />
August 1st. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: A lot was going on that year. That was '78.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was a really long time after that that we got married. We didn't<br />
get married until 10 years later.<br />
<br />
David: Actually, I had hired Betsy as our business manager. That's what I<br />
really needed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Not a wife, then.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not wife then, either.<br />
<br />
David: Not at that point. We had 2 buildings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had one.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, well I was looking for...<br />
<br />
Betsy: My first job was to find another building.<br />
<br />
David: We were expanding like crazy. In fact, one of the reasons that I<br />
didn't hire her sooner, I had just left my day job at AT&T, and was<br />
facing up to, "Oh my gosh, can I afford to take a salary out of<br />
Creative Computing?" Yes, we had expanded a lot, but can I even pay<br />
myself, much less other senior people? I left AT&T in July, and<br />
finally by August it became clear I really have to get this<br />
administration end of things under control.<br />
The editorial was OK. I had enough outside contributors that were<br />
going along with what we were doing in-house that I could continue<br />
with that, but it was the other end of things where we really had<br />
some problems. So then we go to 2 separate facilities. One was a 2<br />
family house on the other side of Morristown, and the other was a<br />
converted greenhouse garage, which is where I started. So, Betsy<br />
was in the greenhouse garage where I had the administration side of<br />
things, and I was at the house and that was the editorial and art<br />
and...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Software.<br />
<br />
David: ...putting the magazine together. Software, right. So she would<br />
come over from her place to my office every day or two just to let<br />
me know what's going on, and we'd get together. But it wasn't until<br />
I don't' remember the date when Betsy was saying, "Well, I'd like<br />
to get into..."<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well I had spent all my summers in college and two thereafter<br />
working at our local newspaper, writing editing and putting the<br />
whole thing together, so I think I more or less just said, "We've<br />
got all these new product announcements that we don't have anybody<br />
to do, why don't I just do them?" So, I started out doing the press<br />
releases and things.<br />
<br />
David: Her newspaper experience was first in high school covering sports.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, I started out covering the unpopular sports as a senior in<br />
high school. Because they didn't want a girl to write about the<br />
important sports. So they let the girl write about the unimportant<br />
sports, which turned out to be the winning sports, at this small<br />
New Jersey high school. That's how I started.<br />
<br />
David: And then at the newspaper, you started by writing obituaries,<br />
right?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well, it's one of the things I did. I always wanted to be a Spanish<br />
teacher. I didn't know anything about this. So, I got this sports-<br />
writing job by way of a babysitting job, I babysat for the<br />
publisher's kids and on the way home one night he said to me, "We<br />
always have a boy from the school who writes about the sports for<br />
the paper, do you know anybody?" and I said, "Well, I know the guy<br />
who did it last year, and if he could do it, I could do it."<br />
So I did that and didn't' think much more of it. Went off to<br />
college, came back over spring break, and ran into the guy in the<br />
grocery store and he said, "Would you like a job working for the<br />
paper this summer?" And I said sure. I had no idea whether he<br />
wanted me to sweep the floors or what, but it was a job so I took<br />
it. It was in the editorial department.<br />
<br />
And I learned from some very serious journalists who had worked for<br />
a very good paper, the Newark Evening News, which was a very<br />
serious paper that probably was too serious and folded, probably in<br />
the mid '60s, but these people were really good journalists and<br />
they taught me a lot.<br />
<br />
I think it was that first year, about halfway through the summer<br />
the publisher was on vacation, the editor was going to go on<br />
vacation when the publisher came back and the publisher, the day he<br />
was supposed to come back had appendicitis, had to have an<br />
appendectomy which back in those days was a much bigger deal than<br />
it is now. The editor said, "Well, I'm leaving." [laughs] And there<br />
I was. I was running this little paper.<br />
<br />
David: So I figured if you can run a newspaper, even though it's just a<br />
summer job, she could do a lot for us. Well, Betsy continued to<br />
handle the administrative things for really quite awhile and, as<br />
she said, probably was initially doing new product releases. Cause<br />
you get just tons of it over the transom and from these smaller<br />
companies...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So you'd like get a press release and then you'd rewrite it, that<br />
sort of things?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well we had a new product section and it was a format, a style for<br />
them, for each one. If they sent a photo, do a photo, a cut line<br />
for it. Basically what I do is let them pile up and then sort<br />
through and figure out which ones were worthy of attention. And<br />
then it was kind of just filler. They ran in one column and when<br />
you came to the end of the magazine whatever you had leftover you<br />
would fill in with these.<br />
<br />
David: And the thing is that the companies that were putting out these<br />
press releases, this was back in the, what '76, '77 or so, tiny<br />
little companies. They had no marketing expertise so they were<br />
sending us, in some cases, not quite handwritten but pretty crude.<br />
So it took some editing and some real work to make them readable.<br />
And then, as Betsy said, you had to guess. OK, which one, this is a<br />
significant product but is this guy going to be able to make this<br />
company go or is it just going to flop? And we tried to be<br />
responsible to the readers. Reporting on things that weren't just a<br />
wonderful great new idea but something that they were going to have<br />
on the market that was going to get some support and everything<br />
else. So anyway. That was a long story of how we got together.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I still don't know how you got together.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We were working in an office about as large as this banquette here<br />
together. Because when we first started working together we didn't<br />
have this other house. So it was the two of us. You had an actual<br />
desk I believe. I had a table that he had made out of particle<br />
board. Yeah it was fancy and I had to put duct tape along it<br />
because the edge was making holes in my clothes.<br />
So we worked in this office back to back, sort of got to know each<br />
other, and became friends, little by little. He said to me, when<br />
you're looking for this building, it would be a good thing if there<br />
was a place for me to live because I'm in the process of getting<br />
separated from my wife. Which it turned out you didn't do right<br />
away but eventually you did. Right?<br />
<br />
David: Well, it was three months later. That was right away in a sense.<br />
What precipitated that was we had a woman that was working in the<br />
mailroom and she got in cahoots with somebody in the accounting<br />
department and they started working a little embezzlement.<br />
<br />
Kevin: This was at the [inaudible 00:13:49] ?<br />
<br />
David: Pardon?<br />
<br />
Betsy: At Creative Computing.<br />
<br />
David: No, at Creative Computing. This was just after Betsy was hired. In<br />
fact, they had it going on before and I mean they were very good at<br />
it. What they did is they set up a bank account in the name of<br />
Creative Computing in the next county. And they would take very<br />
fourth or fifth check and it might be a subscription, it might be<br />
paying for an ad or something...<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was mostly the advertisers.<br />
<br />
David: Well it was both. And then they put that into their bank account.<br />
And then the one that was in the accounting department would mark<br />
the thing as paid.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, she didn't. That was her mistake.<br />
<br />
David: Well, she didn't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because that wasn't her job.<br />
<br />
David: Well she blew one. In any event it was my advertising manager that<br />
we had sent an overdue notice to one of the advertisers.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Apple.<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Apple. It was Regis McKenna, it was Apple's agency.<br />
<br />
David: And they said, we paid that. And a woman said, well send me proof.<br />
And they did. And we looked at the bank where it was deposited and<br />
then we called in local detective, police department. And they got<br />
the bank records and said, "How much do you think this was?" Well<br />
no they didn't say that, they said, this is probably a lot more<br />
than you thought.<br />
And it turned out to be well over $100,000. And our total annual,<br />
not even profit at that point...well, the gross was just about a<br />
million at that point, not quite, but close to it. So $100,000 was<br />
a big, big chunk 10 percent.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When was this?<br />
<br />
David: '78. And, so, obviously we fired these two. And then the court<br />
finally, they determined that they had also, one of them had been<br />
involved in welfare fraud and other stuff and the court ordered<br />
them to pay it back at the rate of, I don't know...<br />
<br />
Betsy: 47 cents a week.<br />
<br />
David: It was some tiny amount.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 00:16:26]<br />
[laughter and crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Course they'll never pay anything.<br />
<br />
David: And we got one payment you know, and that was it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And she was ordered to do public service. Like who wants someone<br />
doing public service for them who's done something like that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Magazines back then, probably any business but, they were a hotbed<br />
of intrigue. You had that happened and then the whole Bike Magazine<br />
getting stolen.<br />
<br />
David: So Betsy actually, in response to that brought, in response to the<br />
embezzlement brought in her Sister-in-Law Bobbi, and I think your<br />
mother too...<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Bobbi's mother.<br />
<br />
David: Bobbi's mother, OK. But one to...<br />
<br />
Betsy: My mother in law. I was a widow at the time.<br />
<br />
David: ...do some of the accounting because we didn't have an accountant<br />
and wanted just to help out and make some calls to advertisers and<br />
say can you speed up your payment a little bit and also calls to<br />
people that we owed money to, hey we're going to be maybe a little<br />
late. It really didn't look good. That was just a huge amount of<br />
money and so we had to stretch things out and hope that the growth<br />
continued so we could recover some of this.<br />
Betsy really rescued us there. It was amazing. We finally did<br />
stretch things out. What precipitated the separation with my wife<br />
at the time is I went home and told her this had happened and<br />
everything.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Thanksgiving weekend. Day before Thanksgiving.<br />
<br />
David: The day before Thanksgiving is when we got all the information from<br />
the police department and I went home to my wife and she said, "You<br />
dumb...," well I won't repeat the whole thing but, "You are so<br />
stupid. You trust people." "Yes, I trust people." "You shouldn't<br />
trust people like that. Get out of the house. I can't put up with<br />
this anymore." So it was a good thing we had a two family house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had this two family house.<br />
<br />
David: I moved into the bedroom on one side.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He had his office on one side of the top floor in the back bedroom<br />
and his bedroom in the back bedroom on the other side and his<br />
kitchen. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is this the place I was reading about where your bedroom was above<br />
the kitchen?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yes. The Ted Nelson.<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, a lot of things precipitated. Because of that, we had to<br />
make some other changes on personnel and move some people around. I<br />
think after that then Betsy took more of a role in the editorial<br />
end of things.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Stayed there until the bitter end.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The bitter end. Actually, I was there after he was gone.<br />
<br />
David: That's true.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ziff continued to pay me several months after they closed the<br />
magazine to stay behind and clean up because we have a 75,000<br />
square foot building. Make sure that we don't dispose of the<br />
hardware and just basically get it ready.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When you quit at the phone company to start a magazine, that must<br />
have been scary.<br />
<br />
David: I had left Digital Equipment in 1974, and I'm sure you read the<br />
whole rationale behind that, and joined AT&T in marketing,<br />
educational marketing. Same thing I was doing at DEC but obviously<br />
marketing different products to a different mix of customers. AT&T,<br />
back then and perhaps today, they had a real formula that you're in<br />
a job for two years and then they rotate you out or they put you in<br />
another job.<br />
The way AT&T works is they have certain steps. There's a manager<br />
and then a director level. There are levels, one, two, three, four,<br />
five. The operating companies, like Pacific Bell and so on, have<br />
similar steps that are considered a half step below AT&T. What they<br />
do is they rotate you out to an operating company, a half step<br />
promotion, they rotate you back into AT&T, now you're a full step.<br />
You never get a full step in one company.<br />
<br />
They had offered me a rotation to Southern Bell. Birmingham,<br />
Alabama. "No. No." Then probably two or three months later said<br />
we've got an opening in Wisconsin Tel. "Oh my gosh. Come on,<br />
something sensible." I turned them down, which was bad. You can't<br />
turn down. If you turn down three you might as well retire.<br />
<br />
The third one was, in a sense, it wasn't a promotion but it was a<br />
sideways job jump within AT&T itself. I went from having the<br />
education group, which was about eight people, to corporate<br />
communications, which is about 100 people and a huge budget. I was<br />
responsible for all of the marketing communications for the whole<br />
Bell system. Not advertising.<br />
<br />
We had seminar centers, put out all kinds of educational pamphlets,<br />
even a magazine for our customers on how to use the equipment. I<br />
was doing that. It's a big job. It's a 50 hour a week job. Creative<br />
Computing was halfway down the block. I'd go there at lunch time,<br />
see how things were doing.<br />
<br />
As I said a little bit ago, when it looked like we were going to<br />
hit a million dollars I said I've got to get serious about this.<br />
That's when I resigned from AT&T. That was probably the first, I<br />
shouldn't say the first, but that was a major problem with my wife<br />
at that time. You're leaving AT&T? You're leaving all those<br />
benefits? What are you doing, you idiot? We were on the downward<br />
spiral at that point and then the embezzlement just sealed the<br />
whole thing.<br />
<br />
Leaving any job for an unknown thing like you started a little<br />
company and you leave your day job. You're making a real<br />
commitment.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Even once you were at Creative full time, it looks like you did a<br />
lot of everything. You were writing, you were doing programming,<br />
you were being the editor, the publisher and the editor which is<br />
not done anymore.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. I don't know. You can correct me. I don't think I was a<br />
control freak.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. You had Phil Ellenberg. You had just hired Phil Ellenberg as<br />
the advertising manager. Richie was doing it. Where did he come<br />
from? He came from some respectable place. He came from some<br />
respectable place, Phil Ellenberg.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, he did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was like a real person who had a real job, not like the rest of<br />
us. He was the ad manager. I think once you made the step to leave<br />
AT&T then you mostly concentrated on the editorial. You weren't<br />
selling ads and writing and you had Steve North who was doing a lot<br />
of the editorial.<br />
<br />
David: At the beginning, yeah. The thing is I'd be lying if I said I knew<br />
how things were going to go, I knew this was going to be a huge<br />
magazine some day. I had no clue. When I started Creative Computing<br />
there weren't even personal computers at that point. I was<br />
convinced, I guess, that they would come about. I had no idea that<br />
it would be three months later that the Altair came about. It was<br />
more that I thought that an educational magazine like we had been<br />
publishing at DEC should continue.<br />
DEC had dropped off. They stopped publishing Edu when I left the<br />
education group. Well, they published an issue or two but they<br />
really weren't serious about continuing it. Then you had all of<br />
these people out here in the west coast, the Hewlett Packard<br />
computers. They were publishing some good software, they had some<br />
good arrangements with Minnesota Educational Computers Consortium<br />
and some others to distribute stuff that they developed, but there<br />
was no information source for schools and teachers and kids that<br />
were using computers.<br />
<br />
That's what I envisioned initially, but then once the Altair and<br />
the others came out people buy this kit computer and say what can I<br />
do with it? We've got these programs that will run.<br />
<br />
Betsy: First you have to steal Basic.<br />
<br />
David: What?<br />
<br />
Betsy: First you have to steal Basic.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I noticed that, I don't know what it's called, the public opinion<br />
or I don't know the word, this part here. The number one magazine<br />
of computer applications.<br />
<br />
David: That was a Davis thing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It started off first issue a non-profit magazine of educational and<br />
recreational. That was November 1970. May/June 1975 the words non-<br />
profit disappeared.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He never set it up as a non-profit.<br />
<br />
David: I did not.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You started making a profit.<br />
<br />
David: That's right. [laughs]<br />
Betsy; It was the unintentionally non-profit.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Three years later it quietly changed into the number one magazine<br />
of computer applications and software.<br />
<br />
David: That was when Ziff Davis took over.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Really? No, that was '78.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, that was '78.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, '78.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He stayed until the end.<br />
<br />
David: Right. OK. You're right. Who knows. We changed it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It seemed like a good idea at the time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's clearly a shift from education to education plus other things.<br />
<br />
David: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think it was when he realized that if you really wanted to make a<br />
profit you had to leave education behind because teachers want<br />
everything for free, or they certainly did then.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They have some websites for teachers. They still do. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Schools, teachers, yeah, they want everything for free and they get<br />
a lot for free. Places like Huntington Computer Project. There was<br />
one out here, Oregon. Yes, there was. I think it was based right<br />
here in Portland. It would have been, right, if it was in Oregon?<br />
Yes, there was a computing consortium at that time, Hewlett Packard<br />
oriented.<br />
Then you had People's Computer Company down in California that was<br />
sort of providing stuff to schools. They were mostly into<br />
alternative schools and there were a lot of them in the Bay area at<br />
that time. In fact, there was a magazine or a newspaper, big thing,<br />
I don't know how often it came out, called the "De-school Primer".<br />
<br />
It was for people that...I won't say they were hippies but<br />
basically homeschoolers but they got together and said, "We're<br />
going to educate our kids outside of the public education system<br />
but we don't want to do it individually. We'll get together." There<br />
was a big movement there and they were into computers, unlike the<br />
public schools back in '75, '76.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Homeschooling back then was very avant-garde. It was not approved.<br />
<br />
David: Not like today. The shift away from education. That, of course, was<br />
partially driven by the hardware that was then available to people<br />
at home.<br />
When I first started the magazine, I had four editors over the<br />
years, five I guess, but Steve Gray had been publishing a<br />
newsletter, what he called the "Amateur Computer Group Newsletter".<br />
It was for engineers who were scavenging up old parts from<br />
Honeywell and IBM and GE and DEC and trying to put together a<br />
computer. You've got success stories and here's how you can make<br />
this worth together.<br />
<br />
That was a long way away from an Altair, but that's what I was<br />
focusing on, people that were doing that and education. Changed our<br />
focus. You're right. Good observation.<br />
<br />
Kevin: After that, do you feel the focus changed in the next 10 years?<br />
<br />
David: The focus changed largely due to selling the magazine to Ziff<br />
Davis.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When's that?<br />
<br />
David: We were negotiating for a while and I think the sale finally went<br />
through in '83. Yeah, '83. Maybe late '82 but roughly then. They<br />
felt that you need more of a business focus, small business and<br />
people running businesses out of their home. That's where it<br />
started but then we got into real small businesses. I shouldn't say<br />
real but a store front or a small manufacturer, something like<br />
that. That's probably a direction we would not have gone. I<br />
wouldn't have gone on my own.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had a magazine called "Small Business Computing." Remember?<br />
<br />
David: That's right, we did. I would have kept Creative more targeted on<br />
the home market and still education, to some extent, but more on<br />
the home and people that were running a business, a single<br />
entrepreneur. You could review a spreadsheet or a small business<br />
computer or higher end printer or something but not lift it up to<br />
that next level up.<br />
When you're owned by somebody else and they say this is what we<br />
want to do you've got to be responsive to it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Why did you sell? Was it something that had to be done? I've read<br />
the official line.<br />
<br />
David: I think the official line is pretty close to the real line. What<br />
happened is the first magazine, maybe not the very first but the<br />
first sizable magazine, to sell was the Byte and they sold to<br />
McGraw Hill. Then there were three or four other sales. At the time<br />
there were maybe eight special interest publishers in the country.<br />
You had Hurst and CBS magazine and Ziff Davis. Maybe eight serious<br />
ones. There were some others that were, "Oh, it'd be nice if we<br />
could get into it."<br />
What happened is all of us at that point were spending maybe<br />
$100,000, $150,000 on circulation promotion. McGraw Hill says we<br />
want to get out there, we're going to spend a million dollars.<br />
They're mailing 10 times as much as we are. They're going to trade<br />
shows with big, elaborate booths and handing out all kinds of...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Free magazines.<br />
<br />
David: Not only free magazines but other stuff. That was half of it. The<br />
other half, which was probably more than half, was the advertising<br />
sales. We were using reps. We had different reps in different parts<br />
of the country, paying the rep commission on the advertising. When<br />
you are a McGraw Hill or a Hurst or a Ziff Davis you've got an in-<br />
house staff. They would have a reception at one of the computer<br />
conferences, a big deal.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We used to have a hospitality suite at the hotels in some of these<br />
conferences and then we would bring little hunks of cheese that we<br />
cut up from home and sneak the bottles of wine up the back stairway<br />
and they were having these big things with the giant balls of<br />
shrimp.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. It was just an order of magnitude different than what we<br />
could do. What happened, really, was that it got to the point where<br />
there were only three, really two, serious bidders that were still<br />
looking for a magazine and there are still about four magazines,<br />
four decent quality magazines, on the market and one was Compute,<br />
one was Interface Age. Personal Computing had just sold, there was<br />
us, and I forget who the fourth one was. There was four.<br />
<br />
Kevin: There were more magazines than buyers at this point.<br />
<br />
David: That's right. There were a lot more magazines, too, but there were<br />
four major players. One of the buyers, I didn't really regard them<br />
as serious, and that was Atari. I think they wanted to back into<br />
the thing. The two buyers left were CBS, and they had a magazine<br />
division at that time, and Ziff Davis and that was it. I said,<br />
"Man, I've got to make a deal here." That's what happened.<br />
I look back with hindsight. I said the guy, Robert I forget his<br />
last name, that owned Compute magazine, he held out. He held out<br />
until the end and he said, "I'm better than Interface Age," and he<br />
was and whatever the other one was, Family Computing, "I'm better<br />
than them." He got a really nice payoff from CBS because it was the<br />
last one and they wanted him. I don't know. If I had held off a<br />
little more would I have gotten more? Probably.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How much did you get?<br />
<br />
David: Can we publish this figure?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't know. I don't think we ever have.<br />
<br />
David: No, we never have.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's my chance for a scoop.<br />
<br />
David: Pardon?<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's my chance for a scoop.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] I'd rather not say. I can tell you Compute, if you ever<br />
read that number, which you will, it was seven times that much. It<br />
was huge. Huge. At that point, I think CBS just said we've got to<br />
get into this. We've really got to do something. The big loser was<br />
Bob Jones at Interface Age. He had a good magazine. That was a<br />
good, solid magazine. Bob Jones, he went to shows, he was always in<br />
a suit and tie. He would have fit into the corporate environment<br />
very well but he held out too long. I think he was holding out for<br />
even more.<br />
That's what I was afraid of. Less than a year later he was out of<br />
business. There was no way you could compete with these big guys.<br />
Ziff instantly started having these receptions at PC expos.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They had ad reps all over the country.<br />
<br />
David: Ad reps, yeah. Oh my gosh. We would not have survived.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Again, you [inaudible 00:41:03] .<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Not exactly right but yes. Wasn't bad. Wasn't bad.<br />
<br />
Kevin: But Ziff didn't have it for very long before they let it go. It was<br />
only a couple of years.<br />
<br />
David: It was almost four years. Three and a half years. They did a study,<br />
and this is one of the classics. I've been making a presentation at<br />
Leslie Park last year on the 10 biggest blunders in personal<br />
computing, and actually it's up to 12 now. One was, and I still<br />
feel that it was huge, is that Ziff Davis analyzed that market in<br />
'85 and determined that the home market, the market for home<br />
computers, had reached saturation. Five percent of the homes have a<br />
computer. That's it.<br />
There were three things, three major conclusions from their survey.<br />
I think probably one and a half of them were pretty good and one<br />
and a half were just absolutely wrong. The home market reaching<br />
saturation, wrong. The second one was that they said that the<br />
magazines that would be successful would be those that were focused<br />
on specific brands of computers. Are you getting all that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: With the IBM PC it really brought standardization to the industry.<br />
Their analysis was that Apple and PC were going to be the dominant<br />
players in the future and in that they were right. They said we've<br />
got to have a magazine that's just focused on those two and they<br />
did. What was their Apple magazine? They had two Apple magazines.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A+.<br />
<br />
David: But they also had the one for the Mac.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mac User.<br />
<br />
David: They had two Apple magazines and then PC. PC they spun off a whole<br />
bunch. PC Week.<br />
<br />
Betsy: PC Junior.<br />
<br />
David: A bunch of them. In any event, they were right in that. The other<br />
one that they were semi-right, in the long term future they were<br />
totally wrong but in the short term future they were probably<br />
right, and that they looked at...We had been covering bulletin<br />
board systems. CompuServe, whatever its predecessor was, basically<br />
online type of stuff.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Genie.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. They said that's just a flash in a pan, online stuff. Well, in<br />
'85 it was. It took a while. It took another 8 to 10 years for that<br />
but then oh my God. You know what's happened today. If they had<br />
stuck with Creative Computing and rather than trying to make it a<br />
small business focused magazine but kept the home and the online<br />
focus we would have owned the Internet market today, absolutely<br />
owned it. It would have been a bigger magazine than all the others<br />
put together. Hindsight is 20/20.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I know it wasn't your choice but do you have regret about that?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: At the time it was devastating.<br />
<br />
David: Absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was like someone killing your child.<br />
<br />
David: At the time, we sat in these meetings up in Stanford, Connecticut,<br />
of all places. The reason for that is Bill Ziff. What happened in<br />
the interim a year or two after they purchased Creative Computing<br />
and PC, Bill Ziff came down with cancer really big time and was<br />
afraid of dying next year. So he was moving all of his resources<br />
and the holdings outside of New York to avoid really major<br />
taxation. I'm not sure that Connecticut was much better but he was<br />
splitting them between Connecticut and Florida. Anyway, we wound up<br />
having a bunch of meetings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was trying to maintain residence in Connecticut.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I guess that was it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was living in the Crown Plaza.<br />
<br />
David: I remember the last one. We were up at the hotel.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Crown Plaza. It was Stanford, it wasn't Harvard.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, Stanford.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I said Harvard.<br />
<br />
David: When they finally came and said we're going to shut this down. That<br />
was a devastating time. We probably could have continued to work<br />
for Ziff if we had been willing to go into New York but when you<br />
get used to working a mile or two from where you live the idea of<br />
commuting into New York, who knows what the job would have been.<br />
Bye. That was it. That was, in retrospect, a mistake.<br />
The other thing that happened as a result of Bill Ziff having this<br />
bout with cancer is that Ziff Davis sold off all of their other<br />
special interest magazines. Popular Boating, Popular Photography.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yachting, Modern Bride.<br />
<br />
David: They had a big group of travel magazines. Actually, one of the<br />
things they did after Creative Computing was to shut down...we got<br />
friendly with the publisher and some of the people in the traveling<br />
division and we started doing some freelance travel writing.<br />
I was writing a monthly column for one of the travel magazines that<br />
went to travel agents on automating your travel office and so on,<br />
which was an interesting thing because there's a small business<br />
that really depended upon computers with the reservation systems<br />
and all the airlines had a different reservation system. You had to<br />
have Saber.<br />
<br />
A lot of them would go with one and make an agreement with somebody<br />
else to make their other reservations. In any event, it was a bad<br />
system and I was writing a column on how to make this work for you.<br />
As you know, I don't know how many months later we got into the<br />
Atari camp.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was your next gig?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. It was Joe Sugarman, remember, that hooked us up with Atari.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I thought it was Neil Harris.<br />
<br />
David: He was the one we worked with but it was Sugarman.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because he came from Commodore. I didn't know it was Joe Sugarman.<br />
<br />
David: He ran a company called JS&A for Joe Sugarman and Associates. They<br />
were the first one that took these full page ads in lots of<br />
different magazines and the quarter page...<br />
<br />
Betsy: The first advertorials.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, advertorial. The first print advertorials. Really serious<br />
stuff. Out of that, he spawned at least a dozen other companies.<br />
Sharper Image is a Sugarman and it's a spinoff. They've got a whole<br />
page just focused on this air ionizer or some crazy product, but he<br />
sold tons of that stuff. Then he started offering courses. He was<br />
on the verge of doing some big deal with Atari and so he knew all<br />
the people out there.<br />
I had taken his course and started running the ad. In fact, there's<br />
probably one in one of those issues that is basically a Sugarman<br />
ad. And so anyway, you took the course, too. So we got to know him.<br />
He got to know us, and we kept up. And, oh, OK. Creative Computing<br />
has folded, and I'm trying to get something going with Atari and<br />
getting their magazine really serious. And so he was the one that<br />
hooked us up with them. By the way, I'm surprised that you don't<br />
have Atari Explorer on your website<br />
<br />
Kevin: On the website? Well, the deal with my Atari magazines website is<br />
I've always strove to get permission. Atari can't be owned by the<br />
same company for more than three months at time.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's hard to get permission that way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You can't get permission. But it's out there, elsewhere. There are<br />
other archivists who don't bother to get permission. That's another<br />
good way to do things. Yeah, it's out there. I think Archive.org<br />
has it.<br />
<br />
David: Really? Yeah, because I hadn't seen it. I was looking for<br />
something...I still get inquires every once in a while from<br />
somebody that wants something in one of the previous magazines that<br />
we've published.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That's why I don't' risk it. There's a few magazine that I just<br />
absolutely would not, because it's owned by some giant monolith<br />
corporation now, and they need to hold on everything even if it's<br />
30 years old.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because someday they might be able to make money from it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right. That's why that's not there.<br />
Talk to me about...You did some weird stuff. The weird stuff I'm<br />
thinking of is the board game.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: "Computer Rage."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We just saw that. We might not have even remembered what it was it,<br />
but we saw it last night at the museum.<br />
<br />
David: They have one in the Collection's area of the Computer Museum. They<br />
didn't even know that we published it. I thought, "Look at this."<br />
<br />
Kevin: You did Computer Rage, which was weird; I want to ask you about<br />
that. You did the record album.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The record album made way more sense than the game.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, well it was a guy named Allan. He was a colonel at that time<br />
and he came to see me with the idea for the computer game.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I forgot about that.<br />
<br />
David: He was a colonel in the Army and had something to do with<br />
educational programs. The Army said people should know more about<br />
how computers work and everything else. He said, "The games that<br />
are on the market are pretty tacky and not fun. I've devised<br />
something." We worked together with him. We finally decided, "All<br />
right. We'll publish this game. By the way, he's a general and<br />
finally retired.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But he's not financing his retirement with [inaudible 00:54:29] .<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: No, not at all.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Will anyone buy this?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We did overprint.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't a big seller or big success, but we sold enough of them.<br />
Now the record was a little different. There was a guy named Dick<br />
Moberg who, at the time, was the president of the Philadelphia Area<br />
Computer Society. The first two personal computer festivals were<br />
actually in New Jersey, not the west coast. The West Coast Computer<br />
Faire came later with Jim Warren and that group. John Dilks started<br />
this computer festival in Atlantic City. This was before Atlantic<br />
City was a big casino place, but...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well, it was a casino place, but...<br />
<br />
David: ...but it was pretty tacky.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It still is.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Not like now.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not like now where it's so classy.<br />
<br />
David: In any event, they were having some issues with the hotel and the<br />
convention center in Atlantic City. Dick Moberg said, "We people in<br />
Philadelphia can do a better job than you guys in New Jersey." And<br />
he got together with what was his name? Lenny? And<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh! Saul Levis.<br />
<br />
David: Saul Levis, who was the president of the New Jersey amateur<br />
computer group. The two of them got together and said yeah, it'll<br />
be more convenient if we do a thing in Philadelphia. And Saul<br />
Levis, he had put together the first Trenton computer festival. It<br />
wasn't a big huge thing; it's gotten to be gigantic. In any event<br />
they said OK, we'll do this. At that point, this was '78; the Apple<br />
had just come out and people were making little plug-in<br />
peripherals.<br />
There was a company that...I'm not going to be able to remember who<br />
it was. They made a nice little plug-in board for the Apple. What<br />
they had was a very nice thing on the screen where you could<br />
position notes and then have them played back. So it was a visual<br />
programming of music.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Music Construction Center?<br />
<br />
Betsy: There were ads for it in magazines.<br />
<br />
David: No, it was a guy out of Denver. I don't remember. Anyway, before<br />
that everything had appeared line by line. But there were some<br />
reasonable playback systems that were starting to come on the<br />
market for the S-100 bus. There were about four of them. The<br />
programming was a little bit harrier, but nonetheless they sounded<br />
OK. And then there was still the leftovers in a sense that people<br />
that were doing work on mainframes to process music.<br />
So Dick Moberg said, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could get a number<br />
of these together?" And of course there's the Philadelphia<br />
Orchestra, we'll make it a Philadelphia Computer Music Festival! So<br />
it was largely his idea, but then, how do you publicize it? Well,<br />
you've got this magazine that's in your backyard, that was willing<br />
to recruit some people and publicize it. So we got about...I don't<br />
know at the festival there were probably 25 or 30 people that had<br />
stuff.<br />
<br />
They recorded it all, which in retrospect was a bit of a mistake<br />
because they had problems with one of the two channels in the<br />
stereo. They had the big reel-to-reel tape recorder, one of the<br />
channels was seriously too low. And then they said, "Well, we've<br />
got this wonderful tape; what are we going to do with it?" And I<br />
said, "Well, I'll do something with it."<br />
<br />
I hooked up with a studio in the city that made records, and we<br />
went in there and corrected the low channel a little bit, not<br />
totally, but enough that it sounded like stereo. And put together a<br />
vinyl record!<br />
<br />
I edited out a lot of the poor quality performances, made the<br />
record, and that sold! It sold pretty well. Our biggest problem was<br />
shipping. How do you ship a 12-inch vinyl record without it<br />
breaking? But that sold pretty well. That, of course, died off<br />
along with everything else when Creative Computing got killed by<br />
Ziff. But, I still had the original test pressing of that, the<br />
original, original.<br />
<br />
I played it back, and it sounded very good. Put it into, I forget<br />
what the software was, but, it was one, the digital routine. It<br />
would have been nice if I still had the original tape, but, I<br />
didn't. But, OK, it's got a little bit of deterioration, going to a<br />
record.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, we're not talking about losing overtones of a<br />
violin up at 15,000 hertz. It was within a narrow band, to begin<br />
with, in any event. But that did let me totally correct the left<br />
channel and bring it up to what it should be. I put that out. I'm<br />
selling CDs now, of that.<br />
<br />
In fact, a guy from Australia ordered one, and obviously, the<br />
postage to send anything overseas is a lot more. He said, "Why<br />
don't you just make MP3 files out of it?" Because, they're WAV<br />
files, the way they are now. I go, "OK."<br />
<br />
This is very recent, like within the last couple of weeks, I<br />
downloaded some software, "Convert WAV to MP3," converted it, sent<br />
them the files. They said, "That's great." What I think what I'll<br />
probably do is try to figure out how I can make them available from<br />
a website.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You've apparently forgotten that, like, 10 years ago, I did that.<br />
They're there.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. I know.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They're at vintagecomputermusic.com.<br />
<br />
David: Are they MP3s?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Well, then, I don't have to do it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You dummy.<br />
<br />
David: Bam. I did remember. I didn't know that you did them all. I thought<br />
you did a sample.<br />
<br />
Kevin: No. They're all there. I can see you're getting reflux.<br />
<br />
David: Boom. I wasted a little time. I waste a lot of time, these days.<br />
That was a cool thing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just think it was neat that you guys were willing to take chances<br />
with weird stuff.<br />
<br />
David: Where we took chances with really weird stuff was in the software.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Software publishing?<br />
<br />
David: We had a brand called, Sensational Software. Unfortunately, Ziff<br />
decided it was competing with some potential advertisers, which it<br />
was, in a sense. They killed it off. But, we had some really good<br />
stuff. We had the Apple game, what the heck was it? It was ported<br />
directly over from the arcade games.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Was it, "Space Invaders"?<br />
<br />
David: "Space Invaders."<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was a clone of, "Space Invaders"?<br />
<br />
David: It was the real.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You got it from, Jeff Lee's guy.<br />
<br />
David: Because, "Space Invaders," the Japanese game, was one of the first<br />
full-sized console video games where they used a general-purpose<br />
chip. "Space Invaders," was programmed for the 6502, Apple.<br />
We bought it from this Japanese company, and we had the only real<br />
"Space Invaders" game. That was one, and a couple of others that we<br />
really could have gone places with. That was just about the time<br />
that Ziff came in and said, "Nah, you can't have this anymore."<br />
<br />
They were into printed media, so, they kept the books going, but,<br />
not any of the other stuff. The other thing we had, was, speaking<br />
of computer music, a little division, that probably could have<br />
gotten a lot bigger, called Peripherals Plus. We were marketing a<br />
little computer music board, it was an S-100 bus once. But if we<br />
had then...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Didn't we have a plotter, too?<br />
<br />
David: Yep. We had about five or six interesting, low-level products. But,<br />
again, Ziff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That stuff was really competing with the advertisers.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Obviously, that wasn't our intent. But, yes it was. We also<br />
offered courses at that time. Do you remember, at County College?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't.<br />
<br />
David: That was just at when we moved into the new building at Hanover. We<br />
had two people that were doing that.<br />
<br />
Betsy: One of them was that crazy, Larry guy. He was seriously weird.<br />
<br />
David: County College of Morris, we reached an agreement that we would<br />
teach their Introductory Computer course. Not for their day<br />
students, but they offered evening courses, adult education, we<br />
were doing that. Fingers in a lot of pies, at that point.<br />
Actually, from that standpoint, it was, probably, good that Ziff<br />
got us a little bit more focused, and back to the roots of<br />
publishing. Getting spread a little thin.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You went to Atari, got the Atari game, and you did the "Atari<br />
Explorer," right?<br />
<br />
David: "Atari Explorer." They had had an occasional publication, not<br />
really a magazine, but one that was focused on the games, and they<br />
decided that they could start that one up again. It started up with<br />
a new name. We called it, "Atarian." It was focused, basically, on<br />
video games. You buy one of their video games and you get an issue.<br />
Anyway, there were different ways that they were going to promote<br />
it.<br />
But, a year later Nintendo just, absolutely, buried "Atarian," in<br />
'89. They kept Atari Spore going for, I think, two more issues,<br />
right?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Was it two?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember the details.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't much.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I remember why they killed it.<br />
<br />
David: Ms. Feisty here. Come on. You've got to tell the story here.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They were playing games with our printer. Production schedule.<br />
Everybody had a production schedule. We never missed our production<br />
date, getting things to the printer, getting them mailed. We just<br />
did it because that's what you had to do. I will probably get sued<br />
for this. Atari started not paying the printer and the printer says<br />
we're not going to print this until we get paid. The date kept<br />
slipping and slipping and the subscribers would be calling up and<br />
saying, "Where's my magazine?"<br />
This went on. It was bi-monthly. It went on for maybe six months. I<br />
finally wrote an editorial in which I explained to the readers<br />
exactly what was going on. They didn't see it until it was printed.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
David: That didn't get into the magazine, though.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It did.<br />
<br />
David: That's right, it did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They never saw it. We were producing it out of [inaudible 01:10:07]<br />
New Jersey and printing it in eastern Pennsylvania and they never<br />
saw it until it was too late. My tenure was cut short but I didn't<br />
really care at that point. I was sick of them. It was really hard.<br />
They're not easy people to deal with, even when the owners last for<br />
more than three months. That was my suicide by editorial. The only<br />
time in my life I've ever been fired.<br />
<br />
David: I didn't realize they didn't read that beforehand but I should<br />
have. I should have.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] I probably wouldn't have gotten fired if they had.<br />
<br />
David: That was the straw that broke the camera's back.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But then John [inaudible 01:11:05] kept doing it a little bit.<br />
<br />
David: I know. In a lot of cases, particularly with the games magazine,<br />
they wanted to approve everything that went in it. If you do an<br />
objective product review, you call it like it is. Oh m gosh, there<br />
was one, it wasn't just one product but a roundup after Consumer<br />
Electronics' show, and I don't remember what it was. Atari had<br />
brought out some new products that really weren't ready to go.<br />
In some cases I just said, "I'm not going to say anything about<br />
this one or these two or three. I'll focus on the ones that are<br />
ready to go or are in good shape." Oh my gosh. "What about this?<br />
This is a wonderful thing." "Well, maybe it will be but it isn't<br />
yet." We had issues all along on censorship and them changing what<br />
we had written and everything. As Betsy said, they were not nice<br />
people to work with. I forget, the two brothers.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Trammell.<br />
<br />
David: Trammell, yeah. That came from Commodore.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Jack and somebody else. Jack and his brother.<br />
<br />
David: It was interesting because yesterday I saw Nolan Bushnell. He was<br />
at that event. Nolan was flamboyant, but basically he had integrity<br />
and he was an honest guy. Man, oh man. Didn't stay and the<br />
corporation changed after he left.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Then you're done with Atari and then it's straight to military<br />
vehicles there?<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] No.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was a hiatus.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, man. We published magazines, in-house magazines, for a couple<br />
other organizations. Did one for Nabisco called...I don't even<br />
remember but it was for their marketing department. Published that<br />
for some period of time and then they decided to bring it in-house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was more like a newsletter.<br />
<br />
David: It was 16 pages. It was getting there.<br />
<br />
Betsy: 16 pages is a newsletter.<br />
<br />
David: All right. Magazine format. Let's put it that way. We did some<br />
fulfillment. Basically, a lot of freelance writing on the travel<br />
field.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Stuffed dogs. The stuffed dogs. Remember those four dogs for my<br />
brother?<br />
<br />
David: That's fulfillment. Fulfillment for Con Edison. I published a<br />
couple newsletters for a while, one called "Effective Investing"<br />
and one called "Effective Communication" for writers. We're talking<br />
early '90s.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was when people still cared, thought that there might be a<br />
correct way to do something and they wanted to know what it was.<br />
<br />
David: That was focused on "Take this computer and start to use it as a<br />
tool. Don't be afraid of the thing." '91/'92 not everybody was<br />
using a computer yet or a personal computer. That was the<br />
orientation of that. Then the other thing we got into big time was<br />
we'd been involved with a local rescue mission for men with drug,<br />
alcohol, homeless issues and we were writing and producing their<br />
newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We were producing all of their fundraising material.<br />
<br />
David: We started, I think, with the newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, we did everything. Appeal letters and newsletters and<br />
maintaining their database, the donor database. It took a lot of<br />
time.<br />
<br />
David: We did that for five years. Then '96 I got an opportunity to buy<br />
this crazy military vehicles magazine for people that were<br />
restoring old historic military vehicles. It was a magazine but it<br />
was I guess more of a glorified newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was horrible.<br />
<br />
David: It was horrible but it was really terrible. In fact, the editor or<br />
the publisher, whatever, the owner, he'd take the articles however<br />
the writer would send them. If it was double spaced type, boom,<br />
that's what would appear in the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Save all the typesetting.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He had zero typesetting expense.<br />
<br />
David: Zero editing. He just took anything that came in, put it in. Ads<br />
the same way. Half the ads were hand written. Well, not half, but a<br />
significant number had corrections on them by hand. Oh my gosh. It<br />
was so terrible. I made it into a real magazine and built it up. At<br />
that point the circulation had been about 10,000. We built it up<br />
and we were pushing close to 20,000 magazines. It was a real<br />
magazine. I sold it to Crowsey publications.<br />
Then they, which I did not realize at the time, the owner, Chet<br />
Crowsey, had put the whole company up for sale and he sold the<br />
company a year or two later to some other specialty magazine<br />
publisher. We're talking narrow, narrow niche. They published a lot<br />
of, what'd they call it, white tail bow hunting. Really, really<br />
narrow stuff. Up in northern Wisconsin is where they were based. In<br />
any event, he sold it.<br />
<br />
The new publishers, their whole stick was making money. They<br />
immediately raised the subscription price of military vehicles. We<br />
were charging $18 a year which was fine and they raised it to<br />
$21.95 or something and they raised the advertising rates and<br />
everything else.<br />
<br />
The last I knew, the circulation was back down around 10,000.<br />
[laughs] It doesn't pay off to take that approach. I didn't have<br />
the same emotional connection, with that as I did with Creative<br />
Computing and the other magazines there. Fine, you do what you want<br />
with the magazine, it's OK.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You didn't care too much?<br />
<br />
David: Nah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What do you guys do now? It seems like charity work and [inaudible<br />
01:19:45] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. I run a non-profit called Beyond the Walls and he runs his<br />
website and does Bible studies.<br />
<br />
David: Right. Actually, Betsy, the organization she has, she's executive<br />
director of Beyond the Wall, that's gotten huge.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's getting bigger and bigger.<br />
<br />
David: It's gotten huge.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think huge is probably an exaggeration.<br />
<br />
David: Well, not huge like a Gates Foundation thing.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I wish. We started in 2005 with 26 volunteers going to Guatemala to<br />
work with this organization that works with the people who scavenge<br />
in the Guatemala City garbage dump. The dump is in a ravine. It<br />
started in the early '50s and as it has filled up around the edges<br />
they put a couple layers of sand on it and let it sit for a bit and<br />
then the people build houses on it out of scraps and things that<br />
they made.<br />
This organization called Potter's House that we work with has been<br />
working with them for 26 years. They have an education program,<br />
micro-enterprise and health and various things that they do. Since<br />
2005 we've been sending volunteer teams. We're not the only ones<br />
sending volunteer teams down there to build houses and do<br />
healthcare and do stuff with the kids. So we started with 26 and by<br />
the end of the year we'll be well over 150 volunteers. We'll have<br />
three weeks this summer, I'll have 135 over three weeks this<br />
summer.<br />
<br />
It started in our backyard and one of the reasons that we wanted<br />
to...It started in the church and we started the organization<br />
partially because it's easier to raise money if you're not a church<br />
and it's also easier to make the volunteer opportunities available<br />
to people. If you say "Oh I'm going to Guatemala." "Oh I'd love to<br />
go with you! Who's going?" "It's my church." "Oh."<br />
<br />
But, if it's this local non-profit it's more appealing and we've<br />
really succeeded in doing that because we have people not only from<br />
in our own community, but this year we're going to have a family<br />
from Oklahoma, about six families from Texas, several people from<br />
Florida.<br />
<br />
David: You got the Virginia.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Virginia. It's like oh my goodness. How is this happening?<br />
<br />
Kevin: And everyone goes out to Guatemala and does the [inaudible<br />
01:22:31] ?<br />
[cross talk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. We all meet in Guatemala. I have three teams. One each week,<br />
and I'll be there the whole time and they'll come down and probably<br />
each team will build two or three houses. They'll do medical<br />
clinic, they'll do day camp for kids, soccer or baseball, sports<br />
things.<br />
They were about teenagers, so they love to do the...Everybody does<br />
construction in the morning. Then, in the afternoon teenage girls<br />
and some of the boys who want to do other stuff will help out with<br />
these other kid-related activities. That's what I'm doing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My wife is in Africa this week and last doing something similar.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Cool.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Which is why I have to leave shortly to go get my kids.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: What part of Africa is she in?<br />
<br />
Kevin: She did some stuff for Special Olympics. Then, they were helping<br />
build something at a food bank. I don't know that much yet, because<br />
she's not home yet.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Cool.<br />
<br />
David: That's terrific. She'll be changed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: She keeps telling that she wished I could've come, and I do, too.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You have this kid. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: We've got the two kids. The six-year-old doesn't feed herself real<br />
well.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: She can't drive to school.<br />
<br />
David: Your annual budget has gone from 0 to what? Are you going to hit<br />
about 150, 200,000 this year?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's over 300 already.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, OK. [laughs] 300.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's small potatoes compared to...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: As my boss, the Chairman of the Board, and I'm the only employee,<br />
is fond of saying, "The people out there don't realize that we're<br />
just a bunch of schlumps sitting around a table making this stuff<br />
up as we go along. Very good leadership. He's a very good leader.<br />
<br />
David: We were trying to maybe see if we can touch base with the Gates<br />
Foundation when we were up there. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: We got a brochure into his hands.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we got a brochure into his hands and some other stuff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was Bill Gates there?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah. I had a picture of him that I had taken at the first<br />
Altair convention in 1976, before he had actually made the deal<br />
with Altair to develop BASIC. He had said, "I can do it," but they<br />
hadn't signed the whole thing. I've got a picture of him as a 20-<br />
year-old or thereabouts, talking at this little convention.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You showed it to him?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. I gave him a copy. The problem I had is that...some people<br />
keep everything. I pretty much give everything away.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, you are lying. You keep everything.<br />
<br />
David: I do keep a lot of stuff. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Then, you give it away later. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Well, when Stan Freiberger was putting together the "Fire in<br />
the Valley" book, I gave him a lot of photographs and I gave him<br />
the originals. Then the publisher said, "It's not good enough. The<br />
photo. You get the negative." OK, they're gone. Never any of that<br />
came back. In fact, what I had to do is scan the photo from the<br />
book to make the print to give to Bill.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Photos of being young and cute.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was his Woody Allen phase. He looked exactly like Woody Allen<br />
did at that phase in his life.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:26:30] too.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm sure there is.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It is a lot [inaudible 01:26:33] .<br />
<br />
David: She improves with age. Every year.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I saw the picture! You look the same.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, the instant Paul Allen showed up, of course, everybody's<br />
mingling around this museum. All of a sudden there was like an<br />
arrow head over in that direction.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was this sucking sound.<br />
<br />
David: And then Bill shows up and, oh my God, everybody has to go see<br />
Bill.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was talking to Bob Rynett this morning, the guy who organized it,<br />
and he said, "Oh, Paul was very happy. Paul was very pleased with<br />
the way the event went." He said his only regret was that he and<br />
Bill didn't have enough time to spend with the people. And I'm<br />
thinking, "Well, OK, if you just stayed a little longer."<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Well, at least Paul Allen did come to the dinner.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, he stayed a little longer, but Bill, he was in and out like<br />
a...<br />
<br />
David: Bill was there for maybe an hour.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He just showed up because he had to.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, exactly. It was a cameo.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:27:52] cameo there?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, yes. There I am. I was thinner then. Oh! There's Ted in his<br />
hat! And Peter [inaudible 01:28:02] . Who's that guy?<br />
<br />
David: Dick Heiser was at the convention and he had one of the hats. The<br />
Xanadu hat.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was wearing one of those hats. The rings were actually silver.<br />
Oh and there's Johnny Anderson. He's the one that wrote that<br />
crazy...<br />
<br />
This was our building.<br />
<br />
David: That was the greenhouse garage building that we started. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: And there was a hole. Was it you or my brother that made a hole in<br />
the wall for an air conditioner?<br />
<br />
David: It was your brother.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And the building was painted white after...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is that the air conditioner? You comment about the low tech air<br />
conditioning.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, that was in an actual window. This building had been painted<br />
white after and right about here a hole had been made in the wall<br />
for this through-the-wall air conditioner. It was rented and when<br />
we moved out, we had this hole in the wall. So, my brother takes<br />
this spare ceiling panel that we had. It was white and sort of<br />
stuffed it in the hole and filled it up so that it really didn't<br />
show any more. We never heard any more about it.<br />
<br />
David: That building today is...<br />
<br />
Betsy: They've made it very fancy.<br />
<br />
David: Oh my gosh! It's a boutique shop and it's really nice. And they<br />
didn't even tear it down. It wasn't a tear-down and rebuild. At any<br />
event, we were not into spending money on facilities. Absolutely<br />
not. The last place that we were in was a printing company had<br />
owned it and they had taken three very small houses that backed up<br />
to railroad tracks and then they built a large warehouse at the end<br />
that was relatively modern. Then they just connected the three<br />
houses with little walkway and so we were in the first house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You couldn't tell that it was two houses.<br />
<br />
David: No. The art department was in the second, then the software group<br />
was in the third one. We had our fulfillment and storage and stuff<br />
in the warehouse.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How much money did you spend on the facility?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not much.<br />
<br />
David: We were spending money on expansion, growing, grow, grow. Then Ziff<br />
Davis comes in, they say, "You got this wonderful warehouse."<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's our warehouse now, right?<br />
<br />
David: That's right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It wasn't though, because you owned it.<br />
<br />
David: I know, but in any event, they said we're going to use it. We're<br />
moving some of your operation, advertising, sales into New York,<br />
therefore you will have more space. It wasn't the trade-off of the<br />
same kind of space or anything. What they did is, they have all<br />
these other magazines at that point, things like "Popular Boating"<br />
and "Yachting" and everything else. All of those magazines, when<br />
you subscribed you got a premium. You got a tote bag or something.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A backpack or a cushion.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. They moved all of their premium fulfillment out to our<br />
warehouse. They said, "Because you're not going to have a software<br />
department anymore, so you won't have to ship any software. We're<br />
going to bring all of our premiums out there." We still have<br />
"Yachting" bags.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yachting bags and seat bags.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Speaking of fulfillment that was something that we did. We were<br />
real pioneers in doing our own fulfillment.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: That's true...<br />
<br />
Betsy: All magazines then used fulfillment houses. You would just send all<br />
the little cards and white mail and everything to your fulfillment<br />
house and they would just take care, enter it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Reader service cards and...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Exactly, and then they would send the labels.<br />
<br />
David: Everything went either to Boulder, Colorado, Des Moines, Iowa, or<br />
some place in Florida.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So when you say pioneers, does that mean you were cheap?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well no, because we were not getting good service, we weren't happy<br />
with the service the readers were getting. And so we decided to<br />
bring it in it house, and we brought a program from a company in<br />
Boston that had written a program to run a PDP11.<br />
And we did we brought the whole thing in-house. We had our own data<br />
entry people. Did all the caging, taking the money out in-house.<br />
Printed our own labels and ship, because then you had to print them<br />
and ship them because there was no electronic delivery.<br />
<br />
David: You know we were real pioneers there and we did spent some money.<br />
Because PDP1170 was not a low-end, with a platter and disk, 12<br />
inch, maybe 15 inch, but a big, big platter drive, and data entry<br />
terminals, DECWriters, VT05. And when Ziff came in, I mean they<br />
were blown away that we were doing our own fulfillment, and doing a<br />
very efficiently.<br />
And the other thing we were doing also was the reader service<br />
cards. We were doing all our own processing of that. The same<br />
computer is same system. A Mini Data System, that's what it was.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No.<br />
<br />
David: No? OK.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mini data was the one you were using...<br />
<br />
[Day 2]<br />
<br />
<br />
David: A couple of the questions you asked yesterday got us to thinking<br />
about things we probably should have mentioned or clarified.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK let's go, let me grab a pen.<br />
<br />
David: One of the corrections, Betsy remembered better than I. the<br />
embezzlement that we were talking about was actually 79 not 78 it<br />
doesn't make a lot of difference but was a year later. It was a<br />
year after I had left my day job, and I was really depending upon<br />
Creative Computing for my income and everything else. So to lose<br />
that was a big blow at that time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So that could have been the end of things right there?<br />
<br />
David: Yes absolutely it could have.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was 79 not 78, is what you're saying.<br />
<br />
David: That's what I said it was 79 not 78.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I was going to ask you to move closer to the microphone.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Actually I don't have to do this. My ego is completely uninvolved.<br />
I would go sit and play with the cats.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Please, please be here. You supplement Dave's memory.<br />
<br />
David: Yes exactly she's very good at that.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: I want to know, how are you going to know how to spell things? He<br />
used the name John Dilks. If you go to write it out, how do you<br />
know how to spell John Dilks?<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'll either Google it, and if it's not in Wikipedia, I'll have to<br />
come back to you and ask, or if they're mentioned in the magazines.<br />
I'll do my best.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm not saying it in a critical way, I'm just impressed that you<br />
don't ask.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just feel this way, I can have everything. I don't have to write<br />
it down. I can concentrate on the conversation, rather than taking<br />
notes.<br />
<br />
David: OK. One thing I thought would be kind of worthwhile...putting the<br />
whole era of the early computer magazines into a perspective. In a<br />
sense, personal computing itself went through several eras as it<br />
accelerated and became so widespread. It certainly didn't start<br />
that way.<br />
You almost have to look at a period before there were personal<br />
computers -- the pre-personal computer era, which I would say would<br />
be 1972 or so up through '75, when the first computers came out.<br />
What was happening then was you had big time-sharing systems.<br />
<br />
Then, manufacturers like DEC and HP were making smaller time-<br />
sharing systems for terminals on a computer. Specifically, Bob<br />
Albrecht opened up People's Computer Company down in San Carlos,<br />
San Mateo, one of the "Sans." It was an open to the public place.<br />
What were people going to do with computers? Well, he wrote this<br />
book of what to do after you hit return, of games.<br />
<br />
Then I wrote my book, not for his center, but for people in the<br />
east that had access to the same type of things on DEC computers.<br />
Those two books actually came out in '72. That was well<br />
before....There was an impetus for people to use computers. Even<br />
though it was mini-computers and they didn't really have their own,<br />
they did have access.<br />
<br />
That, I think, was an important thing because, then, when the kit<br />
computers first came out, which is '75, we really had the kit<br />
computer era from '75 to around '78. That's when it primary was,<br />
the do-it-yourself, build-it-yourself.<br />
<br />
Who did those computers appeal to? It was largely people who were<br />
OK with things like soldering guns. That was largely HAM radio<br />
people. You look at "73" magazine and "Radio Electronics," those<br />
were the ones that dragged the hardware people into the field, and<br />
"Popular Electronics," of course, with the Altair in January, '75.<br />
<br />
You had to know something about, and be a little bit capable with<br />
your hands to get into it. That continued but dwindled off by 1980,<br />
because of course, in '78, you had the three biggies, not biggies,<br />
but self-contained, assembled computers: the Commodore PET, TRS-80,<br />
and the Apple all came out in '78. They were proprietary platforms,<br />
nobody was sharing stuff.<br />
<br />
Actually, the S-100 bus was more shareable. More people got a card<br />
that you could plug into the S-100 bus. There was more, but on the<br />
other hand, you had to build it. That was really a stumbling block<br />
for a lot of people. Then processor technology with the SAL. OK,<br />
here's an S-100 bus machine, but it's all built. That was a big<br />
leap.<br />
<br />
Anyway, you had the, what I call, proprietary era from '78 to '82.<br />
Then it kind of dwindled off, although Apple certainly kept going.<br />
When the IBM PC came out, '81, '82, '83, that ushered in the<br />
standardization era. Everybody, "OK, we're going to make an IBM PC<br />
clone." It was really only Apple, and to a lesser extent, the Atari<br />
and the Commodore that kept going with their own proprietary stuff.<br />
They really couldn't keep going.<br />
<br />
At that time, we started working with Atari. They using the same<br />
chip that Apple had. I thought, "Man, that's an opportunity. Why<br />
don't they just make an agreement with Apple to run Apple software<br />
and everything." They got a 6502, that family of chips in there,<br />
why not? But that wasn't Atari's way of doing things, as you well<br />
know.<br />
<br />
In any event, they went through those stages. As a new one came<br />
along, the other one died off. That though then affected the<br />
magazines, Creative Computing, we came from the pre-era, in a<br />
sense. From the education applications and people having access to<br />
small, minicomputer time sharing systems. When Altair basic was<br />
announced, then it was the obvious thing that we would port over<br />
programs to that.<br />
<br />
Other magazines such as "Byte" and some of the hardware magazines,<br />
they really came from the HAM radio end of things. Wayne Green, who<br />
started "Byte," was publishing "73," which was the biggest magazine<br />
in HAM radio. HAM fests were one of the earliest places where<br />
computers were, or at least hardware, do-it-yourself computers were<br />
really seen and popularized. Wasn't till a little later that we had<br />
computer festivals.<br />
<br />
The real early computer festivals in '75, '76, had a big overlap<br />
with Ham radio. The early ones in New Jersey. That was the earliest<br />
ones. It was, I think, more, not more, but at least half was<br />
oriented to Ham radio. Then, it broadened out, of course, with more<br />
applications being reproduced. Anyway, I think it's kind of<br />
important to know how things fit into that whole scheme of things.<br />
<br />
Magazines either came from the Ham radio and hardware side of<br />
things. They had a different perspective than those like Creative<br />
Computing.<br />
<br />
Well, Peoples' Computer Company, Bob Aldberg, could have had a real<br />
winning magazine, but he was too much in the alternative mode. So,<br />
Peoples' Computer Company never really made it as a magazine. He<br />
didn't want to do advertising or anything that would...<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was a different avenue. It was more like a tabloid-style<br />
newspaper.<br />
<br />
David: Newspaper, yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was more glossy.<br />
<br />
David: Exactly.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was a very different field.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Again, magazine publishing. I remember, early on, I was on a<br />
TV show. McNeil Lehrer Report on Public Broadcasting. Life Magazine<br />
was being re-launched and Time-Warner was spending a ton of money<br />
on this re-launch. They had the publisher of Life Magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was probably Time-Life back then. I don't think it...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. That's right. It wasn't Time. Well, I think it was close to<br />
the time that they merged. Anyway. Yeah. It was Time-Life. Then,<br />
they had me. Sort of the opposite extreme.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You're going to be covered in cat hair by the time you're here.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, I am sure.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's OK. But it matches and sort of goes with it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. It matches fine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You have kind of a theme here. The black and white.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes. Yes. Sorry to interrupt.<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, they were interviewing both of us. They were going to spend<br />
more money on their first issue than our entire annual budget, for<br />
everything. The difference in big publishers, because we we're<br />
talking about that a little bit yesterday, is huge. Really huge.<br />
Now, the interesting thing is there was a magazine back then. I<br />
don't know if it's still around today, called Folio. It was a<br />
magazine for magazine publishers. They covered all aspects of it.<br />
Subscription fulfillment, typesetting and everything else and the<br />
business aspects of running a magazine.<br />
<br />
They had some figures, which were true for a long period of time.<br />
That one out of seven magazine startups makes it for one year. One<br />
out of seven. That's low. Of those, one out of seven makes it for<br />
five years. So, were talking about...<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think Wayne told me almost the exact same statistic.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. One out of 50 new magazines makes it for five years or more.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: Once you make it five years, you're probably good to go for awhile.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
The new Life Magazine comes back, roaring back in. Where are they<br />
today, or even 10 years later from that point. Gone. Didn't make<br />
it. In any event, yesterday we were talking a little bit about<br />
where did we put all our money.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
David: Well, all our money wasn't an awful lot compared to big publishers.<br />
We were a small player. We're big in that field, but...<br />
<br />
Kevin: You're a big fish in a little bowl.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Yeah. There wasn't a lot. Betsy reminded me this morning that<br />
one of the things we did to, in a sense, keep control, is we bought<br />
our own typesetting equipment.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Used of course.<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Used.<br />
<br />
David: Used. Yes. We didn't want to send stuff out to a typesetter<br />
where...what did you [inaudible 00:14:22] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was the same thing with the fulfillment. You are sending it to a<br />
service that gives your work to a minimum wage person who couldn't<br />
care less. Puts her time in and...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Plus you still had code and things that needed to be done right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Done right. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Otherwise it was useless.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. We didn't typeset the code usually. We would actually pace<br />
down the printouts. Part of it was for efficiency and probably, in<br />
the long run, it was cheaper. Just to turn your typesetting around,<br />
send it out and wait for your galleys to come back. Then you<br />
proofread them. Then you'd send it back. Then they make the<br />
corrections maybe and you get it back again. So we said, well...and<br />
then we got this used, copy graphic was it?<br />
<br />
David: Mm-hmm. Yep.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Typesetter. Found a young woman who knew typesetting and hired her.<br />
We bought our own stat camera. We always used to have to send all<br />
the stats and [inaudible 00:15:34] out to be made.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: That was huge then before...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Had our own darkroom.<br />
<br />
David: ...everything was computerized publishing. Yeah. We had our own<br />
darkroom and our own stat camera with the thing that goes over a<br />
screen basically to make it into dots.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: To do that. To make those negatives or [inaudible 00:15:56] , which<br />
are the positive. That was something again. You sent it out and you<br />
get it back.<br />
I said, "Oh, you know what, we got a little more type here than<br />
expected. We want to crop this. Well, we send it out again, and oh<br />
my gosh." Doing all of that in-house, but it cost money. In a<br />
sense, just for the hardware and capital improvements that you<br />
needed to do that.<br />
<br />
We were spending it on that and expansion into other things like<br />
the software. One of the other ones that I was thinking of that we<br />
did, that certainly, really didn't bring us any tangible reward,<br />
was that we were doing some consulting when we started developing<br />
software. We started doing consulting to places like the<br />
Exploratorium in San Francisco. And Sesame Place. That was a big<br />
one for us.<br />
<br />
Sesame Place was a theme park right in our own backyard in New<br />
Jersey. They were going to have these terminals that you could go<br />
up to. One of the programs was Mix and Match the Muppets. You could<br />
take different parts of Muppets and combine them. We wrote a part<br />
of that routine and a whole bunch of stuff that made computers and<br />
these things not computers but approachable things for kids.<br />
<br />
We did some work for the Capital Children's Museum in Washington<br />
and Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Again, did it help us?<br />
Maybe. Did we gain a little reputation? Maybe. Did it translate to<br />
the bottom line? Probably not. As Betsy said, it was fun for you to<br />
do that, wasn't it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, it was fun. It gave him fun things to do.<br />
<br />
David: That was one way that we, in a sense, spent some money.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It makes sense. You guys were the computer experts, probably by<br />
orders of magnitude. Who are they going to go to?<br />
<br />
David: That's right. Interactive games, yeah. I already had a good selling<br />
book out there that was visible, known. We did a lot of that kind<br />
of stuff. Some of it was just fun to do. Another place where we put<br />
I won't say a lot of money but we went to a lot of these shows,<br />
well, there were some that were strictly personal computer shows,<br />
but then also tried to push into things like the consumer<br />
electronics show.<br />
We were the only magazine at the consumer electronics. That's a<br />
huge, huge show. Twice a year, one in Chicago and one in Las Vegas.<br />
We'd take the smallest booth that you could but, still, it was a<br />
fair chunk of change to go to that, but that's how I felt we got<br />
the reach. They were pushing at a lower level. That was video games<br />
mostly at that point. Although we weren't in that market, I just<br />
felt that that was someplace that we wanted to be.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you think that was worthwhile?<br />
<br />
David: I don't know. We were mainly looking for retail stores to sell the<br />
magazine. That was my main purpose for going there. No, it probably<br />
wasn't. It probably was not and it cost us a lot of money to go to<br />
the shows. You have to experiment and do those things. We started<br />
reporting on new developments at the consumer electronics show and<br />
there was some overlap with Computer Inc but it was mostly video<br />
games. No, it didn't have a real good payoff. [laughs]<br />
Then there was the Boston show we went to where Betsy's feistiness<br />
really came out. You go to those shows. I'm not talking about one<br />
of these local computer shows or something. You go to a big show.<br />
You've got to use union labor. We had a computer at our booth. We<br />
wanted to plug it in. You're going to plug in your computer? No,<br />
you can't plug it in. You've got to hire an electrician for an hour<br />
for $75 to plug in your computer.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was a bit extreme. I don't think that was actually true.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know how much it was but you had to use union labor for<br />
different things. Betsy took exception to that at one show and<br />
actually came to blows.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was carrying stuff off the show floor. We were trying to get out.<br />
It was in Boston and we were going to drive back and we were trying<br />
to...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Go home at the end of the show?<br />
<br />
Betsy: ...go home at the end of the show. We were just carrying our<br />
cartons of leftover magazines and books and some union guy comes to<br />
me and starts telling me you can't do this and he was being very<br />
rude. So I punched him in the arm. [laughs] They were not happy.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you have to hire a special punching person to do that?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yes, exactly. I should have consulted with the shop steward before<br />
doing that.<br />
<br />
David: There was a follow-up to that. I'm not absolutely sure but I think<br />
the guy that was running that show was Shelley Adelman. He then<br />
approached us after that little incident. You can't do this. Betsy<br />
was really in his face about come on. We're a tiny little nit. Sure<br />
we can do it. We can carry our own stuff.<br />
Shelley Adelman, whose name you probably heard today, in a sense,<br />
got his start by running these smaller shows around the country and<br />
then he built up to running PC Expo in New York and Las Vegas and<br />
then he got into you run a show in Las Vegas you've got to make<br />
deals with the hotels and so on.<br />
<br />
The earlier PC shows in Las Vegas did not use the convention<br />
center. They were held in I think probably the Hilton. He got to<br />
know hotel people there and he started buying into hotels and today<br />
Shelley Adelman is huge. Not Caesars but he owns one of the really<br />
big casino operations. He's on Forbes list of top 100 wealthiest<br />
Americans.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sure he only uses union labor.<br />
<br />
David: I'm sure he does, absolutely. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's how he got where he is.<br />
<br />
David: We've crossed paths with some interesting people in different ways.<br />
There was another one I was thinking of. Actually, this is jumping<br />
around a little bit. Editorial, in different people submitting<br />
articles and then some people I would ask would you do something<br />
for us early, early on. That's another thing we went to. I went to<br />
comic cons and the sci-fi cons to promote the magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was early.<br />
<br />
David: That was early, very early. I've got to tell you one little<br />
incident there. I also went to small press publisher conventions. I<br />
went to one over Labor Day weekend, and I don't know what year it<br />
was. It was probably '75, '76 maybe. The place that they gave this<br />
small press to exhibit was one platform up in the subway under<br />
Lincoln Center.<br />
Lincoln Center, of course, huge, but down one level is not shops.<br />
There may be a few shops but it was a big, open platform. That's<br />
where we were exhibiting. I had my magazines out there on a table<br />
and I was talking to these other underground publishers and so on,<br />
typical.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's why they put you there. It's underground.<br />
<br />
David: Underground, yes. It was a Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Saturday,<br />
Sunday, Monday. I said, "I can't be here on Sunday." Talked to the<br />
person next to me and I said, "I'm just going to leave a cigar box<br />
that says put your money in the box." He said, "You're nuts. We're<br />
in a New York subway system. You're going to come back with nothing<br />
in your box." I left a bunch of change in it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: And your ex-wife said you were too trusting.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] Yes. I left like 15 single dollar bills in there so people<br />
could make change and I just left it there, from Saturday to Monday<br />
and I came back Monday, about $40, $50 in the box. I don't know<br />
whether it paid for everything that was taken but it worked out<br />
fine. Yes, I was obviously too trusting, but at roughly the same<br />
time there was something going on. I think it was a sci-fi<br />
convention or world future society. Yeah, it was world future<br />
society convention.<br />
They had some notable people there. I was sitting down with Alvin<br />
Toffler in the lobby of the Colosseum and along comes over to us<br />
Isaac [inaudible 00:27:03] (ED: from context, they are talking about<br />
Isaac Asimov). What a wonderful little party. We had some coffee in<br />
the Colosseum and I said, "Isaac, can you write me an article?"<br />
"I got a good story from the robot series that hasn't been widely<br />
used or published and you can use that." So I got an early <br />
contribution from Isaac [inaudible 00:27:27] and Alvin<br />
Toffler wrote something for us.<br />
<br />
Anyway, got to know some interesting people at that point. Then who<br />
should submit an article, and by this time Betsy was the editor...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Out of transom comes an article from Michael Creighton. It was a<br />
program. I can't remember what it was about.<br />
<br />
David: For the Apple.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was a program for the Apple, but it was something really dumb.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know if you remember, we were reminded when Harry Garland<br />
was up at the thing in Seattle. Harry Garland was one of the first<br />
ones to produce an independent manufactured a board, a 100 bus<br />
board, for the Altair, and this was really early, and he called it<br />
the TV Dazzler. It made little squares light up but he could make<br />
lots of them light up in different colors or just a few. It was a<br />
silly program but people said we can do graphics on this.<br />
He eventually developed it into quite an interesting graphics tool,<br />
I guess. People did buy the TV Dazzler for itself but the purpose<br />
was here's a board you could produce graphics, do some graphics. In<br />
any event, that's essentially what Michael Creighton's program did<br />
for the Apple. Not much.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This was not early on.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, it was after the Apple 2 was out.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was probably...<br />
<br />
David: '80.<br />
<br />
Betsy: 1980, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you publish it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. I rejected it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: I'm like we're going to reject an article from Michael Creighton?<br />
<br />
Betsy: We both liked Michael Creighton as an article.<br />
<br />
David: Oh my gosh. But we did. We really did. We had standards.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Later on, though, he wrote something. It was better. It wasn't<br />
great. He did write something better and we did accept it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Orson Scott Card wrote for Compute, I think. I don't know if he was<br />
Orson Scott Card at that point, but [inaudible 00:30:00] .<br />
<br />
David: We've crossed paths with some people.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [inaudible 00:30:09] was actually very nice<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, 6 foot 8, big guy. He was very nice. Unfortunately, he died.<br />
On the other end of things, early on, we really were...this was<br />
probably even before Betsy got in...kind of in the small press<br />
underground publishing movement as much as in the legitimate big<br />
magazines, because that's kind of where I started.<br />
<br />
Betsy: When I came, we had just published the first sleek, coated paper<br />
magazine and coated stock. In October 1978, I believe, that was<br />
published. That was the first of the coated stock. That was kind of<br />
the bridge to legitimacy.<br />
<br />
David: For the first two years, [inaudible 00:31:09] news print and I had<br />
a little tie in with some of the small press people. I was learning<br />
about publishing from small press review, I got to know some of the<br />
people who were doing successful publishing. A lot of them were<br />
magazines and comics out of San Francisco.<br />
So I got to know a little bit [inaudible 00:31:46] and Gilbert<br />
Shelton and Sherry Flannigan, and some of those early, Bobby<br />
London. So anyway, one ad we ran real early on was an adaptation of<br />
Renee and Robert Crompton. Go ahead and change my thing to creative<br />
computing. Go for it. Sherry Flannigan she did a comic strip called<br />
Tronch and Bonnie, Tronch was a little dog and Bonnie was a little<br />
girl and they occasionally got mixed up with a robot dog.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there some sort of falling out with that person?<br />
<br />
David: With Sherry? No. I'm still friends with her on Facebook. They had a<br />
major, major problem, she was involved with Gary Hallgrin and I<br />
forget who the publisher was, McNeil, Bobby London. They were the<br />
Air Pirates funniest group that Disney took to task, that caused<br />
the death of a lot of publishing in the underground comics<br />
movement.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I don't understand.<br />
<br />
David: Air Pirates were funny, they were just looking for trouble. They<br />
had Disney characters flying planes and getting into all kinds of<br />
trouble and getting into problems that Disney characters never<br />
would have done, sexual problems as well as just acting badly.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Disney just said, "We can't put up with this." It was an<br />
interesting case, because was it a copyright violation, not really<br />
because they were character look-a-likes, but they weren't calling<br />
them Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck but they looked the same or very<br />
similar. But, it was a landmark case in underground comics, it<br />
caused a lot of them to pull back, a lot on the satire and stuff<br />
that they were publishing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I asked about Sherry because a number of years ago when I had first<br />
put the best of [inaudible 00:34:29] on my website, then after a<br />
while I got an email saying, "Look, you have to take this<br />
[inaudible 00:34:37] ." I would copyright all, it was just like<br />
waving arms. So I took it down but it was, I thought, maybe it<br />
was...<br />
<br />
David: Well that whole copyright trademark thing, there interpretation<br />
that really, really strict...everything that goes on the Internet<br />
is a public domain. Well, that is not really true either. Are you<br />
making money from copyrighted material? If you are then that's a<br />
pretty clear violation. Are you affecting the copyright owners<br />
ability to make money with it? That's a violation.<br />
I'm kind of in this right now with Uruguay and TinTin, those books<br />
have inspired a lot of people to make parodies and fake TinTin<br />
covers. TinTin at the beach, places TinTin wouldn't normally go.<br />
Well is it affecting the sales of TinTin books, or is it actually<br />
increasingly them?<br />
<br />
Casterman, who owns and [inaudible 00:36:07] owns the TinTin<br />
copyrights. They are really going after some of these people, but<br />
I'm not sure that they have a really good case. So some people take<br />
everything off and don't want nothing on the website. And others<br />
are saying, "Hey, this is legitimate." I have collected a lot of<br />
those covers, and put them up on a website.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I guess you'll find out soon enough.<br />
<br />
David: I will find out, soon enough.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They may not be right legally, but how hard do you want to fight<br />
it.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: I think that they have to demonstrate that it's hurting them in<br />
some way. One last thing, from the question you asked yesterday,<br />
back to the money issue, when I sold the magazine, right at that<br />
time I took 15 percent of what I had received, and donated it to<br />
charities. I have in a sense signed on, although not as an official<br />
signee to the Gates-Buffet initiative to give away half of my<br />
wealth, while I am alive.<br />
At one point in time you can compute that, I have already given<br />
away more than I have received for Creative Computing to Charity.<br />
Of course, it had grown a little bit and we made reasonably decent<br />
investments and that is why it continued to grow. But, I'm really<br />
committed to doing that. My kids are not going to inherit it all.<br />
That's just the way it is, that is the way I believe. Put my money<br />
where my heart is. Anyway,<br />
<br />
Kevin: Other question is, you said something yesterday, I should follow up<br />
that one. You said something about stealing Basic.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well there was this big thing. Just the night before last, at this<br />
dinner we went to, where all the people who were at the first MITS<br />
conference and they referred to the letter that Bill Gates wrote.<br />
<br />
Kevin: "Why are you stealing my software?"<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well exactly. That was just a reference to that Bill Gates, which<br />
had just been brought back to my memory by that. People were<br />
telling stories at this. Instead of having an after dinner speaker<br />
they were just passing the mic around and people were talking about<br />
incidents and things from the past.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you get to sell the story to this group of...?<br />
<br />
David: Not really, I was just followed up on something [inaudible<br />
00:39:24] .<br />
<br />
Betsy: Some of those stories were really boring.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: Oh yeah, long and boring. It's an interesting thing though, about<br />
basic itself, but it was developed at an educational institution<br />
originally by Kemeny and Kurtz at Dartmouth. And they, either<br />
deliberately or because they had gotten a lot of grant money from<br />
General Electric in the early time sharing systems, they basically<br />
let anybody use their Basic.<br />
It was developed at Dartmouth but later Honeywell put a system in<br />
at Minnesota or Florida or someplace else. They could use Basic,<br />
they could have a no license fee or anything. That made Basic a<br />
universal language that was available, at least that version of<br />
Basic. If you write a different version of Basic, where does that<br />
fall? These are some sort of violation and you need some<br />
permission. And basically Kemeny and Kurtz said, "No, you don't."<br />
And they allowed Basic to be used and developed by others.<br />
<br />
Digital Equipment, at the same time, maybe even earlier, but<br />
roughly the same time, had developed also an interactive language<br />
called Focal. And Focal in many regards was more efficient than<br />
Basic, because they were running it on many computer and there was<br />
less memory to work with. On the other hand, and this was true<br />
Digital...as time went on, they said, "No, nobody can use Focal. We<br />
are not going to let, especially those people [inaudible 00:41:59]<br />
." But any place else, nobody could use Focal.<br />
<br />
I think it wound up with a situation like Sony and Betamax. Sony<br />
saying, "Betamax is ours and it is a better format that VHS," which<br />
it was. But then, JVC saying, "We have VHS and Toshiba. Hey do you<br />
want to use it? Fine, we'll license it to you for next to nothing."<br />
<br />
Kevin: You think Focal could have been Basic.<br />
<br />
David: I think it could have been very big. I think it could there could<br />
have been very serious competition between the two languages, but<br />
by Digital limiting it only to their own computers and specifically<br />
to their mini computers, not even the big mainframes, it really<br />
limited the spread of Focal. In fact, it forced me to go out to the<br />
developers and people in educational institutions they wanted<br />
Basic.<br />
There were few schools and colleges in Boston area, near DEC that<br />
were OK with Focal. But stuff was getting published by Minnesota<br />
Educational Computer Consortium and others in Basic, [inaudible<br />
00:43:32] computer project. So they wanted Basic. [laughs] I had to<br />
go on. I hired one group, actually it turned out to be just an<br />
individual guy in Brooklyn that developed a Basic for 4KPDP8. Well<br />
Basic took 3.5K, I gave you 500 words, 512 bit not even the 16 bit,<br />
at least get 2 bits per...but 500 words the right programs. Wasn't<br />
much.<br />
<br />
So that forced Lunar Lander and [inaudible 00:44:15] and some of<br />
those programs actually. Some of them I imported over from Focal<br />
into Basic. And then we had a machine that had 8K. We had a<br />
different version of Basic because Hewlett Packard had a machine<br />
that read cards, mark sense cards. We had to have a different<br />
version of basic for that. Then we had a timeshare Basic. We had<br />
six versions of Basic, five actually on the PDP8 family. It was<br />
absurd, it was crazy, but we had to do it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I was going to ask you, the process of like...you started<br />
saying...you interrupted yourself. You said, "People would submit<br />
articles and then..." I don't know what you were going to say next.<br />
But [inaudible 00:45:08] that I wanted to ask you like just the<br />
process of how the magazine got made. You got an article was,<br />
somebody just typed up or something and...<br />
<br />
Betsy: You mean the mechanics of the production?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We can receive most of the articles for the magazine came over the<br />
transom. And we would get these articles and our editorial system<br />
would log them in and pass them around to editorial staff. John<br />
Anderson and Russell [inaudible 00:45:42] .<br />
<br />
David: Peter Fee.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Peter Fee.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What does it mean over the transom?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Means they weren't solicited. Somebody in the middle of the night<br />
jumped to know [laughs] or through the mailbox. We put a little<br />
piece of paper on there and the guys would write their opinions.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] That is serious.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Some of the things they said. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Like what? What would they say?<br />
<br />
Betsy: "Don't quit your day job." [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: And then they had the rubber stamp.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Somebody found a stamp. Everything that we had was used, including<br />
our desk and everything. And somebody found, at the back of the<br />
desk, a stamp. It said San Marcos on it. This was like the ultimate<br />
insult. [laughs] San Marcos, like you know, "Get out of here."<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Send it to San Marcos?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Send it to San Marcos, wherever that was. Ultimately, I would make<br />
the final decision whether we were going to publish this or not.<br />
Once we were well established, the vast majority of them went back.<br />
We never returned manuscripts. And they would come with piles of<br />
code. A lot of them were programs and, we would decide and the<br />
editorial assistants job to notify the person. Then we bought all<br />
rights, didn't we?<br />
<br />
David: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
Betsy: North American Serial rights, that's what we bought for everything.<br />
Then they would go into a cube. Sometimes we would say something,<br />
"Oh, this is going to go really well with this educational<br />
institute that we're doing in June," Like that one is for June or<br />
just put it in the queue and we will see when it comes or rises to<br />
the top or whatever.<br />
The more technical editors like, John Anderson, he was our best guy<br />
ever. They would go through the code and make sure the code worked,<br />
and I would edit them for content and correct them.<br />
<br />
David: For English and Grammar.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, with a pen and pencil. Then they would go to our typesetter.<br />
Typesetter would correct them. And then they would come back, and I<br />
think, our lower level editorial assistant would proofread them,<br />
but proofread a lot of them too. When they came out typesetter, it<br />
was on a smooth shiny paper.<br />
<br />
David: Photographic paper.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And then, if they had screenshots or anything the art department<br />
would make them into photo stats or [inaudible 00:49:02] . And then<br />
when it was time for them to go to press they would put them on<br />
boards, pieces of cardboard, white paper...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So you paste up?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, they do the paste up and put it on there.<br />
<br />
David: The boards were using non reproducing blue on its photograph. They<br />
had different outlines, blue defined columns, both two and three<br />
column pages and upper limits and page numbers and all that kind of<br />
stuff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: We were still doing it on [inaudible 00:49:43] newspaper in 1990.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well that's exactly it, so you know what we're talking about. And<br />
then once you get it all together and then again somebody has got<br />
to read it to make sure there is no lines left out, particularly of<br />
the programs. Make sure that those all still make sense. There were<br />
many cases where line got left out or artists cuts off a things and<br />
realizes, "Oh, I mean to cut it short." And that whole line<br />
disappears and then you send it off to be printed and all the<br />
subscribers get a little upset because Startrek doesn't run.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: So that sort of thing happened frequently or often?<br />
<br />
David: With typeset material, not much at all. But with program listings,<br />
program listings were really tough. Because you would have people<br />
that would submit something, and they'd have a really cheap, low-<br />
end dot matrix printer. And we always encouraged people, if you're<br />
going to submit a program, submit it in some machine-readable form.<br />
So we don't want to type them all in to make sure they work. Even<br />
though our readers are going to have to, but we don't want to have<br />
to do that. So send us. But even so, we might then print it off on<br />
one of our slightly higher end printers. But I'll tell you what,<br />
you have page breaks and everything else. And the Art department<br />
didn't have a clue about programs and stuff. The program would get<br />
stated down. We weren't using the full sized type for program<br />
listings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. At that point we hadn't the ability to make them fit.<br />
<br />
David: That's where the most common place that you'd lose a line or<br />
something. It would get photographed, and when it's coming out of a<br />
line printer, you might have one or two lines on the following<br />
page. "Oh, we forgot that."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Personally, I know it said so much about magazine that when it<br />
continued, there were just sometimes a handwritten area going,<br />
"Continued over here." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Oh, absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was a early.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It wasn't professional, and that was awesome. It was just like,<br />
"OK."<br />
<br />
Betsy: Then what we would do, we would request when we...we would solicit<br />
articles. Like if there was a new Apple peripheral that we wanted<br />
to review, we'd get the product. Then a lot of times, our own guys<br />
wanted to review the stuff, but if it was something that we didn't<br />
have time for, or that was better suited to one of our freelancers,<br />
we would send it out and ask for a review of it.<br />
A lot of reviews came in over the transom too, but we tried to be<br />
careful of those, that they were not either trying to justify their<br />
own purchase of whatever it was or get even with the publisher for<br />
producing it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Or written by the... [crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: That really wasn't an issue at the time, it was a more innocent<br />
time. That really didn't happen much, but it was, sometimes, people<br />
would get a product they didn't care for and totally bash it, then<br />
we have to go and figure out is it really that bad. We tend to not<br />
produce seriously negative...if it was a really bad product we just<br />
ignored it.<br />
<br />
David: We tried to be objective with reviews, but before I got into the<br />
computer field at all I was in market research. There are a number<br />
of biases, too, that really overwhelmingly affect all kinds of<br />
market research polls or surveys. One is that people think they're<br />
better than they are. For example, if we were doing a poll or a<br />
research study, we'd put a question on basically designed to show<br />
the executives who were using this data that there were some<br />
biases.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He's not talking about Creative Computing.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: No, no. This was way earlier. I'm talking about Proctor and Gamble<br />
products or general foods or that kind of thing. Anyways, the<br />
question we put on was "please rank your driving ability," and we<br />
had from well below average, accident waiting to happen up to Mario<br />
Andretti, Danica Patrick, over there. And you know what, 99 percent<br />
of the population ranked themselves better than the average. Where<br />
is your average then? Its way high.<br />
The other thing, equally pervasive in a sense, is that people<br />
wanted to justify a decision, a purchase decision. In fact, back<br />
the 30s, the slogan for Ford Motor Company was ask a man that owns<br />
one. You ask a man that owns and has made a decision to buy this<br />
car, he's going to say "Yeah, it is the greatest car." So you put<br />
on questions, again, throwaway questions.<br />
<br />
If you had this, or if you were an owner of whatever car it is that<br />
you have. "What do you have now? Would you buy another one?" People<br />
"Oh, yes. This is a great decision. I love this car." I'll tell you<br />
where you can find out, is you look at what percentage of people<br />
that did own that particular car did buy another one? They're<br />
always way lower than they those that say they would buy another<br />
one. It gets more pronounced with higher prices.<br />
<br />
If you've made a decision to buy a high-priced car, you're going to<br />
think, "I'll tell you what. This Land Rover was the best car I have<br />
ever bought." 78 percent of people might say, "I'm going to buy<br />
another one." About 15 percent of the people actually do.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So [inaudible 00:56:49] magazine because people want to justify a<br />
review.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. That's exactly right. And as Betsy said, it could go the<br />
other way, too. "I think I'm getting screwed here with this product<br />
and I'm going to knock it." When you get reviews, in essence, over<br />
the transom, they're either justifying, "This was really wonderful.<br />
I made a great decision buying this particular product," or "I hate<br />
it." It's hard to know whether the review was really objective and<br />
realistic.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you ever push-back from advertisers?<br />
<br />
David: All the time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Can you tell me?<br />
<br />
Betsy: We would feel the pushback from our ad sales people. They would say<br />
"So and so is annoyed with you because you didn't put it." We very<br />
rarely put anybody's totally negative reviews, but we tried to be<br />
objective, and not every product is perfect. Almost every product<br />
is going to have some negative feature.<br />
We would put those in and the advertisers would then go to their ad<br />
rep and complain. Then the ad rep would come to us and say, "Why<br />
are you doing this? These people are mad. I have to sell them ads."<br />
We would just say "Separation of church and State. You are<br />
advertising in this magazine because it's a credible magazine, and<br />
if we let you push us around, it won't be credible anymore, and<br />
then it will reflect on your ad."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you remember anyone ever pulling ads [inaudible 00:58:39] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't, offhand. Do you?<br />
<br />
David: No, but I can tell you the opposite. There were a couple of<br />
magazines that almost ran manufactured press releases as product<br />
reviews. They did get more advertising than we did from some<br />
manufacturers that liked that. I hate to name names, but Compute<br />
Magazine. I don't think you'll find any negative reviews in Compute<br />
Magazine. Everything was the greatest thing since sliced bread.<br />
Personal Computing, similar, very positive. "Gee whiz" reviews on<br />
almost all the things that they saw. It just isn't that way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You have talked about [inaudible 00:59:49] . We've talked briefly<br />
at least about the other magazines. Sync, the one about Timex<br />
Sinclair. I understand the allure of publishing a magazine geared<br />
to a specific system, but why did you pick Timex Sinclair? [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Probably two reasons. One is that we had more of a presence in<br />
England than most of the other magazines.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Still do.<br />
<br />
David: We had a very early agreement with David Tebbet, who was the co-<br />
publisher of Personal Computer, something-or-other. It might have<br />
been Personal Computer World. Yes, it was.<br />
<br />
Betsy Ahi: Yes it was Personal Computer World, and when PC world started they<br />
had to call it PC World because there was already a Personal<br />
Computer World in England.<br />
<br />
David: And we had an agreement that they would reprint materials from<br />
Creative Computing, which they did for a while but then they<br />
developed their own in-house capabilities and there was enough<br />
differences. We went to England and very early on had an agent in<br />
England that we could take subscriptions.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A housewife who kept her dark issues in her spare bathroom.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we still know her. Hazel Greaves, Hazy. Anyway, so we were<br />
getting enough subscriptions from England. We were sending over, I<br />
don't know how they packaged them up, but they call them Mbags, M-<br />
bags, mail bags basically of magazines, then we mail them from<br />
England. So I had more of our connection with British market than<br />
probably any of the other magazines, we definitely did.<br />
And so I get to know Clarkson Clair and what's going on over there.<br />
And then when they bring over the computer to this country and<br />
Timex, my God, big outfit. They were going to market it. By that<br />
time you know, there was no point starting a [inaudible 01:02:25]<br />
magazine or an entire magazine. They were, Or Apple, they were<br />
already existed. So maybe this is going to be the next big one. We<br />
will be right there when they start and we were.<br />
<br />
Timex actually put, what we had simple, simple sink or something<br />
but it was in the package with the computer. So that was one way of<br />
getting our subscriber base and we couldn't possibly afford to<br />
advertise and do direct mailings for magazine like that. But they<br />
were in essence helping us go on. So that's why it is pretty<br />
successful actually. Often, we were making money on the magazine<br />
mainly because we didn't have to promote it.<br />
<br />
If we had to get subscriptions, we could not have possibly made it<br />
work. There wasn't enough advertising really. I don't know what the<br />
issue here was, but it was not as good as we would have liked it.<br />
The magazine would have been tiny if we maintained the same<br />
advertising to edit ratio we would have liked. But we didn't lose<br />
money out of it but we didn't make anything out of it either. I<br />
think it was a breakeven proposition.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Microsystems. [inaudible 01:04:09] .<br />
<br />
David: I said there was a lot of early development in New Jersey and there<br />
was a guy named Saul Libes, you will find him probably, [laughs]<br />
who was the first president of the Amature Computer Group in New<br />
Jersey. He was a Professor at [inaudible 01:04:43] College and he<br />
felt that Byte magazine started out fine but then they were<br />
focusing more on assembled hardware and things that were already<br />
made.<br />
So he wanted to get down on really lower level of do it yourself,<br />
build it yourself. Microsystems was more like Byte was in the very<br />
beginning, focusing on circuit diagram, this was logic in PC's and<br />
everything.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There first name was S100, Microsystems<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, S100 perhaps then it became Microsystems in '78 or '79. When<br />
some of the others came out they started [inaudible 01:05:45] 6800<br />
and 68,000 chips from Motorola. But I would say it was a really<br />
techy magazine and it was one that I think probably killed that one<br />
off.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was dead before [inaudible 01:06:05] . [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: It might have been. I don't know, but it was...<br />
<br />
Betsy: S100 bus did not survive and to the [inaudible 01:06:12] .<br />
<br />
David: It was dead before as there was these eras and the do it yourself<br />
S100 era,that was '75 to '78. Then it kind of had a downward spiral<br />
of two or three years and it was gone. Well, maybe it wasn't gone<br />
but it wasn't the same. And so Microsystems was tuned into that and<br />
they were running hardcore stuff.<br />
And the reason that Saul...we reach an agreement with him to<br />
publish it, is basically he didn't have any real magazine<br />
background. We thought we could do something with it. It turned out<br />
not to be a good fit bit we published it for a while. I don't know<br />
if we made money or lost money on that. Probably it didn't make<br />
anything. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Small business computers or computing.<br />
<br />
David: What?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Small business computers? Who do we buy that from? I can't even<br />
remember. You can't even remember that we had it, I can tell by the<br />
look on your face<br />
<br />
David: I can<br />
<br />
Betsy: That one of my brothers...my brother was a publisher remember?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I don't know who or where we got it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That just fall into grave or...?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Eventually, but that we post it for a while. I think is something<br />
that somebody basically left on our door step.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think it was kind of like a puppy on the... [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: I think it came with your brother.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, because my brother wasn't into publishing until after clearing<br />
college.<br />
<br />
David: It sounded like a good idea at the time.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think we saw a future in business computing<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we did and unfortunately that was one word as if they just<br />
want...I mentioned yesterday that they wanted to really shift the<br />
focus of Creative Computing away from home and broaden out and<br />
shifted into the small business market. And just did not, it was an<br />
uncomfortable fit. We would've been better to have a separate<br />
magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember where we got Small Business Computing from or<br />
where it went.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know, either.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But I know that obviously it wasn't a huge acquisition.<br />
<br />
David: It was a footnote.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A footnote in the story. [laughs]<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Actually, a bigger acquisition was earlier and that was ROM<br />
Magazine. Rom was published by who? (ED: not the Atari-related<br />
magazine of the early 1980s.)<br />
<br />
Betsy: Erik Sandberg-Diment.<br />
<br />
David: Right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: D-I-M-E-N-T.<br />
<br />
David: Connecticut. He did a nice job with the magazine, very nice job<br />
with it. Published nine issues and a little different focus than<br />
Creative but it really overlapped us very nicely. He had more<br />
graphic stuff. In fact, it was through him that I got to know<br />
George Baker and some of the people up there. The other guy that<br />
did the pixelated blocks photos. You've seen those.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The Einstein.<br />
<br />
David: [crosstalk] The Lincoln with block pics.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Block pics.<br />
<br />
David: Block pics. OK, he and George Baker sort of came as a package with<br />
Rom, they knew of each other. We actually, I would say, four or<br />
five issues, ran Rom as a whole separate section and even set it on<br />
the cover of Creative Computing and Rom. Then it became evident...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think that was because he had a whole other editorial kicking<br />
around. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We bought.<br />
<br />
David: Could be. And then we would just merge it in completely, but that<br />
was a very good fit. It brought us more editorial than it did<br />
subscribers. They did not have a big subscriber base, but it was a<br />
nice marriage in a sense.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Video and Arcade Games only published I think four issues.<br />
<br />
David: Three.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Three?<br />
<br />
David: Actually, three but if you've got a hold of the third one, you're<br />
doing well. I think Ziff cut that off after two real issues got<br />
mailed out. We did a third one but it wasn't sent out to<br />
subscribers.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My website only has two issues.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. There were only two that really were distributed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So I have...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: A goal. [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, if you can get a hold of the third one. [laughter] I don't<br />
even have that. There's a same thing on Tarry-on. There were three<br />
issues of Tarry-on that I did not keep the third issue. Oh, man.<br />
Shoot me.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: But Video and Arcade Games, there were at least five or six other<br />
magazines focusing on that. Talk about magazines that were running<br />
non-objective manufacture-provided reviews, all the others were. I,<br />
maybe, convinced myself and some people at Davis that there was a<br />
need for really objective...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ziff? Did Ziff do that?<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Were we with Ziff when we did that?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah. That was a late one. So we said, let's...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Continue it through.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, that was definitely. Let's do it. But again...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not only that but it was going to be fun.<br />
<br />
David: It was going to be a lot of fun. [laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: So why did it fail?<br />
<br />
David: OK, again you got to look at the eras and what was happening.<br />
Arcade games then really were on the decline. Video arcades where<br />
you go in and pop a quarter in, because there was so much more<br />
capability in the home computers and the [inaudible 01:12:55] and<br />
the Mattel and the different home systems. They could do all now,<br />
not as much, but you get a pretty darned good game that you could<br />
take home with you and not have to pop a quarter in the slot every<br />
time you play.<br />
So arcade games were kind of on the downward spiral, so that<br />
eliminated a lot of potential advertising. We weren't going to get<br />
any advertising from Nameco and all of the producers of the arcade<br />
games, which was, "Hey, it is advertising along with..." And the<br />
other home producers of the game, there were four or five magazines<br />
already that they were pouring money into. They didn't really want<br />
another one.<br />
<br />
So it was advertising that or just lack of advertising that killed<br />
that off. We just couldn't get it. I think there was still a need<br />
for what we had sort of in a sense proposed to do of objectively<br />
reviewing games and secondly, we're telling people how to play<br />
them.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, it was strategies.<br />
<br />
David: Strategies. It was advertising that we just didn't have, couldn't<br />
get.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:14:28] Atari explored and Atari I think we've covered<br />
pretty well.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Military vehicles, which we talked about.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] Yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So the other magazines, Byte and [inaudible 01:14:45] , was it<br />
rivalry? Was it friendly competition?<br />
<br />
David: Byte, we were in bed together. Not in bed together, but we<br />
published the best of Byte. Creative Computing did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: For awhile.<br />
<br />
David: Well, just one.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. That wasn't that friendly a rivalry. It wasn't that friendly<br />
after awhile.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't friendly once they sold to McGraw Hill, and they sold<br />
early. Then everything was off. We did some joint promotions with<br />
Byte for hardware creative software. We ran the ads for each other<br />
for a short time.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's when McGraw Hill cutoff.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] In a heartbeat. No more of that.<br />
<br />
David: We felt that basically we weren't even competing for the same<br />
advertisers. Just a few, but not really. Certainly, we were not in<br />
direct competition at all with Byte. So that was just kind of all<br />
in the same place and you're going in a hardware direction, we're<br />
going on the software.<br />
When Wayne Green threw this intrigue with his wife and everything<br />
else, lost Byte Magazine. He was fit to be tied. "I'm going to kill<br />
them!" and he started Kilobyte. It wasn't killable. It was Kilobyte<br />
for I don't know how many issues.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not many.<br />
<br />
David: 1000 bytes. [laughter] and a kilobyte, it had a dual meaning there.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: That was a ferocious and very nasty. Oh, horrible rivalry. Somebody<br />
early on forced him not to use the name byte at all.<br />
<br />
Betsy: So it was byte.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: So they changed it to Kilobaud.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Which didn't mean anything.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: No.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So did you have a relationship with Wayne?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Nobody had a relationship with... [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Nobody really had a relationship. I knew him, of course. He was<br />
going his own way. Now the one area actually where we got into more<br />
competition with him than in the magazine itself, because again, he<br />
was trying to be like Byte, hardware oriented and he published 73<br />
magazines so he was basically focusing on the ham radio people, the<br />
do it yourselfers and so on. But they started a software division.<br />
It was pretty good. They had a lot of the same types of software<br />
that we did on cassette tape.<br />
In any event, we really had more of a head to head rivalry on the<br />
software than in the magazine publishing. We never really had<br />
anything to do with the magazine products or books. They also<br />
published some books but more like the magazine hardware type of<br />
thing. We weren't quite as selective, but our book publishing we<br />
did get into things that weren't in the magazine. We published<br />
books with more of a hardware orientation. We had a little broader<br />
line of books than the type of things that we had in the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I don't know if you want to open this can of worms, but you said to<br />
me in an email, "You couldn't find two people whose vision,<br />
philosophy, ethics, and view of business and life was further apart<br />
than Wayne and I." Can you elaborate on that? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was just basically unpleasant, is my take on him. I didn't know<br />
him that well but it was just sort of like he had a chip on his<br />
shoulder and was daring you to knock it off. Wouldn't you say?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You knew him before I did but by the time I arrived on the scene<br />
that was just sort of the general industry perception of him, I<br />
think. It was just stay away from him, leave him alone, he's not<br />
very nice.<br />
<br />
David: Well, one other thing, which we sort of touched on a couple of<br />
times, I'm very trusting. [laughter] Overly so, according to my ex-<br />
wife and I think there would be a couple of examples. Wayne would<br />
walk out of that door, boy, out of sight, 'you're going to do<br />
something to screw him' is what his view would be. He did not trust<br />
anybody.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] And least of all, his ex wife.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: It's the old saying, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean<br />
that somebody isn't out to get you." He thought everyone was out to<br />
get him, everybody. So we were totally philosophically different.<br />
Our ways of doing business were different. I shake hands with you,<br />
we have an agreement. You don't shake hands with Wayne.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't think his employees were ever happy either.<br />
<br />
David: Oh!<br />
<br />
Betsy: You talked to them and it shows. He didn't have like a great...<br />
<br />
David: Rapport.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well it was not. The culture of his organization I don't think was<br />
particularly, I think it was probably permeated with this lack of<br />
trust.<br />
<br />
David: Well, one thing, we had fun. We really did have fun at Creative<br />
Computing. Perhaps some of the editorial staff, too much. There was<br />
one point where Betsy had to away their...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well they were all young guys. Some of them even still in high<br />
school, they would play games for hours and hours and hours, long<br />
after the reviews were done. It was one, self-contained thing that<br />
played football, and they played it for hours. I had to take it<br />
away from them. Like "don't make me be your mother"<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there any drug culture at all? If you read [inaudible 01:22:17]<br />
and he was cocaine and high everyday and popped...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not that we knew of. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: The East coast was quite different.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No there was nothing, really. I don't think so. In fact, my client<br />
John Anderson and Peter Fee, they were actually kind of protective<br />
of me in a lot of ways. I can remember being in John's office and<br />
they were talking about a movie or something like that. John said,<br />
"No, you wouldn't like this movie, don't go to this movie." That<br />
kind of thing, they were funny guys. They just kept laughing. David<br />
Lubar. They were free spirits but they were very funny, talented<br />
guys.<br />
<br />
David: He is coming out with a line of children's books, weird, weird<br />
stuff. The last one, something about the lawn mower weenies. He has<br />
a line of 6 or 8, and they're all little short stories. Some of<br />
them were adaptations of stuff that almost got published in<br />
Creative Computing, probably some of them did. Lubar is a funny<br />
guy. When he left and went to work for one of the video gaming<br />
companies, his first big successful game was "Worm Wars." You were<br />
like, "Worm Wars?" [laughs]<br />
Other people are fighting real serious warrior and you are fighting<br />
with worms. We just had a different kind of culture, a lot of fun.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Jonny Anderson went to work for A+ in San Francisco. He was one<br />
of the five people killed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1986.<br />
He was in a car and a piece of the building fell on the car. He was<br />
a really funny guy.<br />
<br />
David: We did not have a serious business culture.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, we had this great big room with a bunch of tables set up around<br />
the edges, in the middle. It was kind of like that, nowhere near as<br />
neat.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I will clean that up for you.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] Just tangles of wires, and we had to have one of every<br />
kind of computer so we can test all the software, and this one<br />
would be running this kind of peripheral, and it was like a young<br />
guys dream job.<br />
<br />
David: You commented yesterday about how we had a bunch of high school,<br />
not quite, but still...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I said that they were in their early 20s but they basically had the<br />
maturity of high school students, they needed a little bit of<br />
mothering. But I wasn't that myself. They were just really nice<br />
guys, we did a good job hiring those kids.<br />
<br />
David: When you talk about the Atari cultures and some of the others,<br />
where every Friday some of these companies have parties, that kind<br />
of thing. We had an annual party, a picnic. We didn't need weekly<br />
parties and stuff to let you have fun because that stuff was going<br />
on every day, not really partying but playing the games and<br />
bantering and everything else.<br />
As they say, at Washington, a real efficient business culture.<br />
Heck, I didn't work for Digital Equipment, which was still a pretty<br />
relaxed place, but AT&T which was anything but. This is as far away<br />
from that kind of corporate culture as you can get, but it worked.<br />
Didn't make a lot of money, but it worked.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:26:58]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. And I think they appreciated it because they weren't making<br />
tons of money either, but they were having a lot of fun. They<br />
enjoyed going to work, they really enjoyed it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Speaking of Kindle, I've done it but haven't told anybody yet that<br />
best of Creative Computing too is now available on Kindle. And I<br />
have been working backwards. [crosstalk] I just had it on sale.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I haven't publicized it yet for sale.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They won't let you do. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah, I think they will have two.<br />
<br />
David: Did you do that through Amazon? How do you convert is to Kindle?<br />
I scan them and then I do CRM and I use Elance or utilize some<br />
service in India that converts it back to ASCII, and then they<br />
convert it into an E-book from there. It's a lot of work, I want it<br />
done well, and I want it to be super awesome. And they just<br />
[inaudible 01:28:40] , like we were talking about before.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Outsourcing and stuff. But I can do it myself but that would take<br />
way too long. So I just try to do the quality control [inaudible<br />
01:28:49] . It's not perfect but better than nothing.<br />
<br />
David: I have reached the point where with my Dodge restoration book, that<br />
yes, many of the borders around the pictures are terrible, they're<br />
hand drawn and so on. But I'm not going to bother to re-do that, I<br />
just want take the book, get it into some sort of machine readable<br />
format, PDF or something. [inaudible 01:29:24] somebody that can...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah, I can get you off with that. We can then figure it out.<br />
<br />
David: I found one extra one that I can cut up.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That will help a lot. [inaudible 01:29:37] . If you want to sell a<br />
PDF of it, that would be up in couple of day. That's easy, but a<br />
searchable Kindle version that takes longer.<br />
<br />
David: I don't want a Kindle version because people want to print out<br />
something that they can...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Take out to the garage<br />
<br />
David: When people slide under the vehicle they have it there, "Oh, OK<br />
this is what I should be looking for."<br />
<br />
Kevin: If you scan it and upload it to Amazon, even create space from<br />
[inaudible 01:30:06] company, then there could actually be another<br />
book, that looks pretty identical to the first one. We will figure<br />
out.<br />
Do you [inaudible 01:30:23] ? But are you familiar with...?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Are there any?<br />
<br />
Kevin: There are but they are very different than Creative.<br />
<br />
David: Somebody out there said, "What did you read today?" The only<br />
magazines that I will occasionally pick up in the computer field<br />
are mostly from England, Internet magazines, well there are<br />
several, which is sort of interesting that the dominant Internet<br />
magazines come from England, but they do.<br />
If I want to do something, and I haven't lately, but I wanted to<br />
get into doing something different or interactive or something with<br />
my website. I'd pick up one of those magazines and kind of have<br />
same kind of thing that Creative used to publish. Here is a code to<br />
do it in Pearl or HTML, whatever.<br />
<br />
I converted all of my website, quite a while ago, to XHTML from old<br />
HTML. I did not like any of the programs that generate web pages,<br />
mainly because...Well, today its probably OK, but I felt that<br />
earlier on, they were very inefficient. You'd have this much code<br />
for something and XHTML would write it in five lines.<br />
<br />
My old-fashioned [inaudible 01:32:23] said, "You know what, the<br />
interpreter or compiler or whatever, has to go through a lot of<br />
that just to pick out what is going to be displayed." My web pages<br />
are very compact and short. They are all XHTML, none of that is<br />
extra [inaudible 01:32:41] style pages and everything else.<br />
<br />
Anyway, so that's what I'll pick up a magazine for. I'm was doing a<br />
little bit of programming in Pearl and then I said, "No. You know<br />
what, I can get routines that I can download and I don't have to<br />
learn it myself. I learned enough to know that I don't want your<br />
Pearl program." [laughs] Or what is the other one? I don't know.<br />
I'm right at the point now where I'm wanting to do some more things<br />
that I can't, so I'll probably purchase some more computer<br />
magazines and learn about it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Has anyone talked to you about the purchase of PC by Davis?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is a big story.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: She was involved.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was involved. There was a magazine called PC. I was in San<br />
Francisco.<br />
<br />
Kevin: PC magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: PC Magazine, right. And, there was a guy named Tony Gold and there<br />
was somebody else that I can't remember. There was Tony Gold and<br />
this Mr. X started this magazine and they hired...David Banell will<br />
probably tell you all, I don't know all the details but I'm sure he<br />
has it engraved in his brain.<br />
They hired David Banell to run it and I guess several other people,<br />
and my understanding is, that they told them they were going to<br />
give them a piece of the action, they weren't going to pay them<br />
very much but you're all part owners and everything, but nobody<br />
ever wrote it down.<br />
<br />
So when Ziff Davis approached Tony Gold and Mr. X and wanted to buy<br />
the magazine, and the guys said, "Oh yeah, sure," and they sold it<br />
to him and all these people that were working for them said, "Well,<br />
what about us. We're part owners too." But there was no proof of<br />
it. So Ziff bought it, and they were right in the middle, just<br />
about to go to press with an issue and they got word that it had<br />
been purchased by Ziff.<br />
<br />
So David Banell took just about the entire staff and they walked<br />
out and went across town and started PC World. Apparently their<br />
lawyers said, "Don't take anything with you." So they just walked<br />
out and left the offices as they were, and Ziff, who now had a<br />
magazine to get out and no one to do it, sent me out to San<br />
Francisco for a couple of weeks and there was like an editorial<br />
assistant and a couple of freelance writers, were the only people<br />
left.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So this is when you became the interim.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is how I become the editorial director of PC. So I basically<br />
went out there and walked into this office and had to pull together<br />
their issue and get it off to the printer. They had a big dummy on<br />
the wall where everthing...<br />
<br />
Kevin: They lay all the...<br />
<br />
Betsy: They lay all the impositions where all the pages and the stories<br />
were going to go and they moved everything around. [laughs] But<br />
they couldn't resist.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That is awesome.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This one guy, whose name I wish I could remember. Barry Owen,<br />
worked with me, and we were able to get it off to the printer and<br />
then pack everything up and send it back to New York and then they<br />
hired Barry Owen, he moved to New York and he eventually become the<br />
editor, because that was who they had.<br />
I was sort of the editorial director for a while and they said<br />
that, "If you were going to do this, you would have to come to the<br />
city. We are going to really set up an office here and make it<br />
real." And I said, "No, I am not going to drive into the city every<br />
day or take the train or the bus or anything." It was a interesting<br />
story and we were getting much more interesting version of it from<br />
David Barnell, who was there. [laughs]<br />
<br />
And in the mean time, they were all starting up PC World and taking<br />
all of their freelancers and trying to make it as difficult as<br />
possible for PC. That was a big rivalry, obviously.<br />
<br />
David: And then it created a couple of months of problems at creative too,<br />
because my editor was gone. I had really gotten very dependent to<br />
rely on her for so many things. "I got to edit this myself." And<br />
then the whole question mark was, OK if PC magazine, is she can<br />
stay with it. It was a time of uncertainty.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm sure it was a bad career move.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. But PC magazine still exist.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, exactly. I don't know if I would have existed if I had to<br />
commute to New York, that's a nasty commute. Millions of people do<br />
it but, I just didn't want to be one of them. I didn't mean to<br />
interrupt, so back to you.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What are you most proud of, or everything you have done?<br />
<br />
David: OK, that's obviously not a one word answer. Proud is, I am not<br />
crazy about it. I guess the fact that I continued to hear from<br />
people that said, "Hey, I got my start in computing from Basic<br />
computer games or Creative Computing," or something that I had my<br />
hand in, that makes me feel pretty good.<br />
You have a long term, or longer term influence that just what you<br />
do at the time, it's living on. It's not living on forever. Basic<br />
isn't going to live on forever. But I think the idea that having<br />
some positive influence on other people, on their lives, on their<br />
careers, that's a good.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You helped send people into the computer science field.<br />
<br />
David: And you know the specific individual accomplishments. Yeah, I wrote<br />
a couple of programs that are probably in some cases, maybe not the<br />
program but the routines, are still in use. That's minor compared<br />
to having an influence on people and their career and their<br />
outlook, their future. That's way more important. "OK so I wrote a<br />
great algorithm, so what."<br />
<br />
Kevin: And you really think it's the same algorithm that's being used in<br />
Google maps and...<br />
<br />
David: Portions of it, yeah. But that is minor. I look back and I say,<br />
"Almost anything that I wrote in the last 30-40 years, if I were<br />
doing it today, I would have done it a little differently, but I<br />
didn't know then what I know now." So there's no one thing I could<br />
say, "Oh, that was a really great article, or great insight," or<br />
something. Anything can be improved upon.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sure. That's what disappoints me about computer magazines today is<br />
I don't think that it seems like children going to be able to go.<br />
It's not going to motivate anybody to do anything, other than use<br />
Word version 18 or whatever. There's no Basic programs to type<br />
anymore and it's not exciting.<br />
[cross talk]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Well, [inaudible 01:42:31] was mentioning that at breakfast,<br />
oh gosh that was just yesterday.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was yesterday [laughs] .<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] That kids today don't have any feeling about, or I should<br />
say knowledge about the real basics of bits. What is a bit?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: Nobody knows anymore. He wanted to find some little simple piece of<br />
hardware. Really, I guess he has, that every kid when they're in<br />
the 5th or 6th grade will be exposed to this so they'll have some<br />
concept of what bits are all about. Are you ever going to get that<br />
into schools today? No. So anyway, it's just kind of, hopefully<br />
there's been some long term influence.<br />
And what I'm doing now even, which is mainly developing bible<br />
studies for...well, I mostly have guys that have had a drug or<br />
alcohol addiction problem coming to this. They're in a rescue<br />
mission. I'm hoping that these studies can have a little bit of an<br />
influence on the direction of their lives. They're a positive<br />
influence on where they go from here. So it's kind of, people more<br />
than a specific thing or whatever.<br />
<br />
[pause]<br />
<br />
Those are terrible copies.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They are copies. These are from the scans. I was printing scans and<br />
I wasn't trying to make them pretty. Just for my reasons, it was<br />
quick and dirty. I could've bumped the contrast and stuff.<br />
<br />
David: There's Carl.<br />
[pause]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do have anything left, like how many subscribers you had over time?<br />
Is that data around anymore? How many newsstand copies you had? I<br />
assume that is a lot.<br />
<br />
David: OK, maximum, I think we mentioned that. We hit just about a half a<br />
million before Ziff killed it. Then, they gave people a choice of<br />
three magazines that they expected to continue to publish, PC,<br />
Apple's A+, or Mac User.<br />
I'm guessing that most people went with PC. One of the reasons<br />
actually was Ziff's rationale at that point was, PC World had<br />
really grown a lot and the circulation base of PC World and PC were<br />
very close. They were both about a half million. PC might have had<br />
a small lead.<br />
<br />
Then, by killing Creative Computing and rolling all of those<br />
subscribers, there was some overlap. Certainly, there were some<br />
subscribers that got both magazines. You probably had a quarter of<br />
a million additional subscribers into PC. All of the sudden, they<br />
go to advertise, "We've got three-quarters of a million and PC<br />
World only has half a million."<br />
<br />
That was when PC had a huge growth spurt. You know, they started<br />
publishing those telephone-book-thick issues.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I would think that it probably still holds the record for the<br />
largest magazine ever published, whenever the issue was that they<br />
published it, it was their biggest one. Certainly magazines aren't<br />
getting bigger now. They didn't continue to increase in size after<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: Then they started publishing it twice a month. The nudge that the<br />
subscriber base at Creative, gave to PC really, separated them<br />
completely from PC World. They had their reasons.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. This is a chart of the page count of Creative Computing over<br />
its life. It's not a question, I just made a chart. Every December<br />
there's a peak for the big December issue. Right at the end it<br />
just, all of the sudden, stopped.<br />
<br />
David: Well, that's when Ziff had decided to kill it, which was almost a<br />
year before. They basically let us publish for another eight or<br />
nine months after they had made the decision.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was a lot of back and forth. Are they going to kill it? Are<br />
they not going to kill it?<br />
<br />
David: They weren't promoting, no subscription promotion. They were saving<br />
their money. If you don't promote the subscriptions, you're not<br />
going to get them.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is page count.<br />
<br />
David: It was advertising.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:48:59]<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't actually subscriber base didn't drop them. That's cool.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just thought I'd do a comparison, even though that's not really<br />
what I'm doing here. In the beginning, you guys were bimonthly and<br />
they were monthly. I couldn't know how to do it accurately. Their<br />
page count's actually higher, because they were doing twice as<br />
much. I don't have all the data here. You guys tended to publish<br />
larger issues than "Kilobyte?"<br />
<br />
David: It was so dependent upon advertising. You got some magazines, they<br />
would run 80, 90 percent advertising, if they could. In some<br />
special interest fields, you can get away with that, because people<br />
are actually buying the magazine for the advertising, not for the<br />
editorial content.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [inaudible 01:50:02] , a good example.<br />
<br />
David: That's exactly right. Even what the guys that bought Military<br />
Vehicles, they just went over so heavily to...I always believe that<br />
you should have at least one-third editorial content, preferably<br />
more. They dropped down to 20 percent to edit.<br />
<br />
Kevin: There was one issue, the 10th anniversary issue, I don't mean to be<br />
picking on Wayne here. There was this quote he happened to say,<br />
which I thought was really interesting to me, I wanted to get your<br />
take on it. He said, this is in 1984, "A computer system doesn't<br />
really stand a prayer anymore unless there's at least one<br />
dedicated, independent magazine for its users."<br />
<br />
David: Wayne said that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wayne said that. Is that true? At the time, would you have agreed<br />
with that?<br />
<br />
David: In '84? Again, you've got to look at where we were in the cycle at<br />
that point. The cycle was then, there were more computers dying off<br />
than there were new ones being released. Standardization had come<br />
in really. You've got the IBM PC, and everybody's producing a PC<br />
clone. Apple kept going, and Atari, and Commodore attempted to.<br />
If you were to start a computer company at that point, with a new<br />
computer, yeah, you'd need something to give your user base<br />
something to do with it, more than just what the manufacturer was<br />
selling. So, that's probably accurate. What do you think?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, I think it's accurate. That's what people started to expect.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. Another chord of the same issue which we've kind of touched<br />
on from Tom Dwyer. This is in 1984. He's saying, "Computer<br />
magazines used to have personality [laughter] and now they don't."<br />
Now, they really don't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They really don't!<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think they still have personality in form but now it's just<br />
inconsistent.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Who was Tom Dwyer? I don't remember him.<br />
<br />
David: Tom Dwyer? He was at University of Pittsburgh. He came up with all<br />
those neat applications. He and Margo...He had the best basic<br />
primer of anybody, in fact the only one that both Kemeny and Kurtz<br />
endorsed outside of their own material. He had really written some<br />
good Basic books.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm just finishing up here. The Internet says you were born in<br />
1939. Is that right?<br />
<br />
David: Yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Where were you born?<br />
<br />
David: New York, New York.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent.<br />
<br />
David: I was born in the hospital that my father had a hand in designing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Really?<br />
<br />
David: He was an architect up until the Recession. I think he, perhaps,<br />
designed the restrooms but he wasn't the...<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: When were you two married?<br />
<br />
Betsy: 1988. 25 years ago.<br />
<br />
David: June 18, 1988.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What's your last name now?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mine?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ahl.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I tried keeping this professional thing and it was just way too<br />
confusing, since that really wasn't my name anyway. That was my<br />
first husband's name, and then just...this is way too complicated.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My wife kept her maiden name and now she wishes she hadn't. It's<br />
just confusing. It just made sense to do.<br />
<br />
Betsy: If had been my maiden name, I might have, but it really wasn't.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What haven't I asked you that I should have?<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] We kind of were noodling it around last night and said,<br />
"Man, the guy's thorough."<br />
<br />
Betsy: You the most prepared interviewer ever.<br />
<br />
David: I jotted down a couple of notes. Nope.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Got everything?<br />
<br />
David: What's your thinking? Because originally you were talking to me<br />
about covering Wayne's magazines and so on.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My original thought, when I had put no thought into it, was that it<br />
would be half about Wayne's magazine and half about Creative. First<br />
of all, after talking to him, I thought there's not enough to do<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: Did you talk to Wayne?<br />
<br />
Kevin: I talked to Wayne.<br />
<br />
David: Well that's good to know, right? Carl Helmers didn't know if Wayne<br />
was still alive.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He's still alive.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's true. We asked Carl Helmers if Wayne was still alive and he<br />
was [inaudible 01:56:06] .<br />
<br />
David: Actually, there was another guy up there that published a computer<br />
magazine. What the heck was the name of it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Who are you talking about?<br />
<br />
David: Up in New Hampshire, Peterborough. It was one of the earlier would-<br />
be competitors to Datamation. So, it was much earlier.<br />
He was absolutely totally convinced about the Kennedy assassination<br />
and published a computer analysis of all the photos and everything<br />
else. Every single issue of the magazine had this stuff. He and<br />
Wayne were on the same wavelength on that. You ask Wayne about the<br />
conspiracy. [laughs] You'll get an earful.<br />
<br />
Kevin: In answer to your question. First, it was going to be the two, and<br />
then that happened. Also my wife said, "If you're doing two, then<br />
it's going to seem like a compare and contrast thing." That's not<br />
what I want to do.<br />
Now I'm thinking that this will be a project about the earliest<br />
computer magazines, the first computer magazines. That way, I can,<br />
whatever, four or five chapters. One on Creative, and maybe Byte.<br />
I'm meeting with the editor of Byte in a couple of weeks at an<br />
event, maybe Interface Age or one of the other ones.<br />
<br />
David: If you can find Bob Jones, that would be an interesting contrast.<br />
He was Interface Age. He had a different perspective on a lot of<br />
things, and I had a lot of respect for him. He just didn't sell at<br />
the right time. Too bad. Bob Jones was a very serious, good guy.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Who were the other early people? Dr. Dobbs? I don't know what...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, Dr. Dobbs...<br />
<br />
David: Jim Warren! Oh my goodness. That would give you another perspective<br />
altogether.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's, again, the California...<br />
<br />
David: Jim Warren and Bob Albrecht are tied together very closely. They're<br />
both in sort of in the alternative lifestyle. I don't know what<br />
you'd call it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That probably had Friday afternoon pot parties. [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Oh, boy. Did they ever! Yes, yes. Jim also was the one that started<br />
the West Coast computer fairs. He's a very capable guy. Dr. Dobb's<br />
journal was in a sense, well, you've probably seen it. You have,<br />
right? OK, so you know.<br />
That's really low level programming rather than higher languages.<br />
We're talking about machine languages, assembly language,<br />
programming, and there. It was sort of like Microsystems was to<br />
Byte. Microsystems, for the really serious hardware guy. Dr. Dobbs<br />
was for the really serious programmer, compared to Creative which<br />
was for people who just wanted to type something in that would<br />
work.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:59:35] basic right. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Dr. Dobbs. That was a totally different [inaudible 01:59:43]<br />
competitor.<br />
<br />
David: We didn't compete at all. I had a view that we competed at all with<br />
them; they may have thought we did but I didn't think so.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did they even have advertising?<br />
<br />
David: Oh yeah, actually they did, and it kept going for a long time<br />
because it was a small little nitch magazine. But, yeah, Jim Warren<br />
would be an interesting guy, very interesting guy early on. I don't<br />
know about Albert because you say he published more tabloid<br />
newspapers. I don't know if they ever really published any magazine<br />
size thing or not. Probably not, but it would give me a totally<br />
different perspective because they are coming from the west coast,<br />
looser or whatever.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That sounded pretty loose.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah nothing compared to that.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think he was sort of in rebellion when he started working at<br />
Creative Computing because he was coming off of AT&T where he had to<br />
wear a suit to work every day. So the first thing he did was burn<br />
his suits and wear t-shirt and jeans way before anybody was doing<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: I went extremely in the other direction, yeah I did, but who else<br />
real early. Personal computing which I think David Barnell somehow<br />
involved in it at some point in there. Because they moved from the<br />
west coast to New Jersey, they were bought by...who was that? It<br />
was mostly a company that published things like hardware age and<br />
advertiser-driven magazines. What was the name?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, gosh. Begins with an 'H'.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Halshep<br />
<br />
David: No. Anyway, when they brought personal computing...I think Barnell<br />
maybe even started it, and then they moved it to New Jersey, and<br />
then David said "I'm not going to New Jersey. I'm a west coast<br />
guy," or whatever. And then, they changed the whole thing totally.<br />
That's why I said they're one of the ones where they were so<br />
totally advertiser driven. A press release is a product review, as<br />
far as they were concerned.<br />
They had some interesting stuff. They were a competitor only in<br />
name, but also because they got the advertising. "I think I'm going<br />
to advertise." "Oh! We're going to publish a wonderful review! Give<br />
it to us." And so they were early, and they made money. There were<br />
a bunch of flash-in-the-pan magazines that lasted 2 or 3 or maybe 6<br />
issues, but nobody...<br />
<br />
Kevin: But only one in seven made it, so...<br />
<br />
Betsy: One in seven, right?<br />
<br />
David: That's right, exactly. I can't remember the name of some of these<br />
ones, but there was a very successful big magazine that published<br />
all Apple...reviews of Apple stuff. What was that one? Apple by<br />
themselves spawned I'd guess half a dozen magazines.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Inquest, and Insider, and Apple...a bunch of others there.<br />
<br />
David: Right. Actually, there's one that I can't think of the name of, it<br />
turned out, it was bigger and thicker and creative. They were<br />
publishing a lot of stuff, but again, it would all be positive and<br />
so they really killed us on getting advertising. We had been a<br />
publisher of Apple material for a while. Then all these others came<br />
along. That one, whatever it was, was really took a lot of<br />
advertising from us. I'll think about it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You'll remember.<br />
<br />
David: I'll remember some of this. When it all settled out, you came back<br />
down to eight or nine, but the ones we're talking about...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Well, at one point there was 200.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I think that's correct.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You are probably counting newsletters..<br />
<br />
Kevin: Probably industry-specific stuff and niche stuff but still, you<br />
went from one to 200, 10 years ago.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. That's true.</div>Mauryhttps://www.computingpioneers.com/index.php?title=Dave_Ahl_and_Betsy_Ahl&diff=145Dave Ahl and Betsy Ahl2019-09-25T18:26:54Z<p>Maury: a plus -> A+</p>
<hr />
<div>This is a transcript of an audio interview. This transcript may contain errors - if you're using this material for research, etc. please verify with the original recorded interview.<br />
<br />
Source: ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast<br />
<br />
Source URL: http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-280-david-and-betsy-ahl-creative-computing-magazine<br />
<br />
Interviewer: Kevin Savetz<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm interested in how you guys got together. Was it some sort of<br />
office romance? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It started before then. I was working at Drew University and I was<br />
dating the computer science professor. He invited Dave...he was a<br />
subscriber to Creative Computing. I can remember being at his house<br />
and picking up a copy of this magazine and thinking, "Creative<br />
Computing," and laughing. "What kind of a title is that?"<br />
He invited Dave to come speak to one of his classes. While he was<br />
there, he said, "I should stop by your placement office. We're<br />
starting to expand. I'm looking for some people." Right? Am I<br />
getting this right? I was looking for other opportunities, so I<br />
sent him my resume. Many months later, he hired me.<br />
<br />
David: She still smarts about that.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: I interviewed her in, I don't know, April or so.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You interviewed me on April 17th and you did not hire me until<br />
August 1st. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: A lot was going on that year. That was '78.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was a really long time after that that we got married. We didn't<br />
get married until 10 years later.<br />
<br />
David: Actually, I had hired Betsy as our business manager. That's what I<br />
really needed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Not a wife, then.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not wife then, either.<br />
<br />
David: Not at that point. We had 2 buildings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had one.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, well I was looking for...<br />
<br />
Betsy: My first job was to find another building.<br />
<br />
David: We were expanding like crazy. In fact, one of the reasons that I<br />
didn't hire her sooner, I had just left my day job at AT&T, and was<br />
facing up to, "Oh my gosh, can I afford to take a salary out of<br />
Creative Computing?" Yes, we had expanded a lot, but can I even pay<br />
myself, much less other senior people? I left AT&T in July, and<br />
finally by August it became clear I really have to get this<br />
administration end of things under control.<br />
The editorial was OK. I had enough outside contributors that were<br />
going along with what we were doing in-house that I could continue<br />
with that, but it was the other end of things where we really had<br />
some problems. So then we go to 2 separate facilities. One was a 2<br />
family house on the other side of Morristown, and the other was a<br />
converted greenhouse garage, which is where I started. So, Betsy<br />
was in the greenhouse garage where I had the administration side of<br />
things, and I was at the house and that was the editorial and art<br />
and...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Software.<br />
<br />
David: ...putting the magazine together. Software, right. So she would<br />
come over from her place to my office every day or two just to let<br />
me know what's going on, and we'd get together. But it wasn't until<br />
I don't' remember the date when Betsy was saying, "Well, I'd like<br />
to get into..."<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well I had spent all my summers in college and two thereafter<br />
working at our local newspaper, writing editing and putting the<br />
whole thing together, so I think I more or less just said, "We've<br />
got all these new product announcements that we don't have anybody<br />
to do, why don't I just do them?" So, I started out doing the press<br />
releases and things.<br />
<br />
David: Her newspaper experience was first in high school covering sports.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, I started out covering the unpopular sports as a senior in<br />
high school. Because they didn't want a girl to write about the<br />
important sports. So they let the girl write about the unimportant<br />
sports, which turned out to be the winning sports, at this small<br />
New Jersey high school. That's how I started.<br />
<br />
David: And then at the newspaper, you started by writing obituaries,<br />
right?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well, it's one of the things I did. I always wanted to be a Spanish<br />
teacher. I didn't know anything about this. So, I got this sports-<br />
writing job by way of a babysitting job, I babysat for the<br />
publisher's kids and on the way home one night he said to me, "We<br />
always have a boy from the school who writes about the sports for<br />
the paper, do you know anybody?" and I said, "Well, I know the guy<br />
who did it last year, and if he could do it, I could do it."<br />
So I did that and didn't' think much more of it. Went off to<br />
college, came back over spring break, and ran into the guy in the<br />
grocery store and he said, "Would you like a job working for the<br />
paper this summer?" And I said sure. I had no idea whether he<br />
wanted me to sweep the floors or what, but it was a job so I took<br />
it. It was in the editorial department.<br />
<br />
And I learned from some very serious journalists who had worked for<br />
a very good paper, the Newark Evening News, which was a very<br />
serious paper that probably was too serious and folded, probably in<br />
the mid '60s, but these people were really good journalists and<br />
they taught me a lot.<br />
<br />
I think it was that first year, about halfway through the summer<br />
the publisher was on vacation, the editor was going to go on<br />
vacation when the publisher came back and the publisher, the day he<br />
was supposed to come back had appendicitis, had to have an<br />
appendectomy which back in those days was a much bigger deal than<br />
it is now. The editor said, "Well, I'm leaving." [laughs] And there<br />
I was. I was running this little paper.<br />
<br />
David: So I figured if you can run a newspaper, even though it's just a<br />
summer job, she could do a lot for us. Well, Betsy continued to<br />
handle the administrative things for really quite awhile and, as<br />
she said, probably was initially doing new product releases. Cause<br />
you get just tons of it over the transom and from these smaller<br />
companies...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So you'd like get a press release and then you'd rewrite it, that<br />
sort of things?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well we had a new product section and it was a format, a style for<br />
them, for each one. If they sent a photo, do a photo, a cut line<br />
for it. Basically what I do is let them pile up and then sort<br />
through and figure out which ones were worthy of attention. And<br />
then it was kind of just filler. They ran in one column and when<br />
you came to the end of the magazine whatever you had leftover you<br />
would fill in with these.<br />
<br />
David: And the thing is that the companies that were putting out these<br />
press releases, this was back in the, what '76, '77 or so, tiny<br />
little companies. They had no marketing expertise so they were<br />
sending us, in some cases, not quite handwritten but pretty crude.<br />
So it took some editing and some real work to make them readable.<br />
And then, as Betsy said, you had to guess. OK, which one, this is a<br />
significant product but is this guy going to be able to make this<br />
company go or is it just going to flop? And we tried to be<br />
responsible to the readers. Reporting on things that weren't just a<br />
wonderful great new idea but something that they were going to have<br />
on the market that was going to get some support and everything<br />
else. So anyway. That was a long story of how we got together.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I still don't know how you got together.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We were working in an office about as large as this banquette here<br />
together. Because when we first started working together we didn't<br />
have this other house. So it was the two of us. You had an actual<br />
desk I believe. I had a table that he had made out of particle<br />
board. Yeah it was fancy and I had to put duct tape along it<br />
because the edge was making holes in my clothes.<br />
So we worked in this office back to back, sort of got to know each<br />
other, and became friends, little by little. He said to me, when<br />
you're looking for this building, it would be a good thing if there<br />
was a place for me to live because I'm in the process of getting<br />
separated from my wife. Which it turned out you didn't do right<br />
away but eventually you did. Right?<br />
<br />
David: Well, it was three months later. That was right away in a sense.<br />
What precipitated that was we had a woman that was working in the<br />
mailroom and she got in cahoots with somebody in the accounting<br />
department and they started working a little embezzlement.<br />
<br />
Kevin: This was at the [inaudible 00:13:49] ?<br />
<br />
David: Pardon?<br />
<br />
Betsy: At Creative Computing.<br />
<br />
David: No, at Creative Computing. This was just after Betsy was hired. In<br />
fact, they had it going on before and I mean they were very good at<br />
it. What they did is they set up a bank account in the name of<br />
Creative Computing in the next county. And they would take very<br />
fourth or fifth check and it might be a subscription, it might be<br />
paying for an ad or something...<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was mostly the advertisers.<br />
<br />
David: Well it was both. And then they put that into their bank account.<br />
And then the one that was in the accounting department would mark<br />
the thing as paid.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, she didn't. That was her mistake.<br />
<br />
David: Well, she didn't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because that wasn't her job.<br />
<br />
David: Well she blew one. In any event it was my advertising manager that<br />
we had sent an overdue notice to one of the advertisers.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Apple.<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Apple. It was Regis McKenna, it was Apple's agency.<br />
<br />
David: And they said, we paid that. And a woman said, well send me proof.<br />
And they did. And we looked at the bank where it was deposited and<br />
then we called in local detective, police department. And they got<br />
the bank records and said, "How much do you think this was?" Well<br />
no they didn't say that, they said, this is probably a lot more<br />
than you thought.<br />
And it turned out to be well over $100,000. And our total annual,<br />
not even profit at that point...well, the gross was just about a<br />
million at that point, not quite, but close to it. So $100,000 was<br />
a big, big chunk 10 percent.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When was this?<br />
<br />
David: '78. And, so, obviously we fired these two. And then the court<br />
finally, they determined that they had also, one of them had been<br />
involved in welfare fraud and other stuff and the court ordered<br />
them to pay it back at the rate of, I don't know...<br />
<br />
Betsy: 47 cents a week.<br />
<br />
David: It was some tiny amount.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 00:16:26]<br />
[laughter and crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Course they'll never pay anything.<br />
<br />
David: And we got one payment you know, and that was it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And she was ordered to do public service. Like who wants someone<br />
doing public service for them who's done something like that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Magazines back then, probably any business but, they were a hotbed<br />
of intrigue. You had that happened and then the whole Bike Magazine<br />
getting stolen.<br />
<br />
David: So Betsy actually, in response to that brought, in response to the<br />
embezzlement brought in her Sister-in-Law Bobbi, and I think your<br />
mother too...<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Bobbi's mother.<br />
<br />
David: Bobbi's mother, OK. But one to...<br />
<br />
Betsy: My mother in law. I was a widow at the time.<br />
<br />
David: ...do some of the accounting because we didn't have an accountant<br />
and wanted just to help out and make some calls to advertisers and<br />
say can you speed up your payment a little bit and also calls to<br />
people that we owed money to, hey we're going to be maybe a little<br />
late. It really didn't look good. That was just a huge amount of<br />
money and so we had to stretch things out and hope that the growth<br />
continued so we could recover some of this.<br />
Betsy really rescued us there. It was amazing. We finally did<br />
stretch things out. What precipitated the separation with my wife<br />
at the time is I went home and told her this had happened and<br />
everything.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Thanksgiving weekend. Day before Thanksgiving.<br />
<br />
David: The day before Thanksgiving is when we got all the information from<br />
the police department and I went home to my wife and she said, "You<br />
dumb...," well I won't repeat the whole thing but, "You are so<br />
stupid. You trust people." "Yes, I trust people." "You shouldn't<br />
trust people like that. Get out of the house. I can't put up with<br />
this anymore." So it was a good thing we had a two family house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had this two family house.<br />
<br />
David: I moved into the bedroom on one side.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He had his office on one side of the top floor in the back bedroom<br />
and his bedroom in the back bedroom on the other side and his<br />
kitchen. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is this the place I was reading about where your bedroom was above<br />
the kitchen?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yes. The Ted Nelson.<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, a lot of things precipitated. Because of that, we had to<br />
make some other changes on personnel and move some people around. I<br />
think after that then Betsy took more of a role in the editorial<br />
end of things.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Stayed there until the bitter end.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The bitter end. Actually, I was there after he was gone.<br />
<br />
David: That's true.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ziff continued to pay me several months after they closed the<br />
magazine to stay behind and clean up because we have a 75,000<br />
square foot building. Make sure that we don't dispose of the<br />
hardware and just basically get it ready.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When you quit at the phone company to start a magazine, that must<br />
have been scary.<br />
<br />
David: I had left Digital Equipment in 1974, and I'm sure you read the<br />
whole rationale behind that, and joined AT&T in marketing,<br />
educational marketing. Same thing I was doing at DEC but obviously<br />
marketing different products to a different mix of customers. AT&T,<br />
back then and perhaps today, they had a real formula that you're in<br />
a job for two years and then they rotate you out or they put you in<br />
another job.<br />
The way AT&T works is they have certain steps. There's a manager<br />
and then a director level. There are levels, one, two, three, four,<br />
five. The operating companies, like Pacific Bell and so on, have<br />
similar steps that are considered a half step below AT&T. What they<br />
do is they rotate you out to an operating company, a half step<br />
promotion, they rotate you back into AT&T, now you're a full step.<br />
You never get a full step in one company.<br />
<br />
They had offered me a rotation to Southern Bell. Birmingham,<br />
Alabama. "No. No." Then probably two or three months later said<br />
we've got an opening in Wisconsin Tel. "Oh my gosh. Come on,<br />
something sensible." I turned them down, which was bad. You can't<br />
turn down. If you turn down three you might as well retire.<br />
<br />
The third one was, in a sense, it wasn't a promotion but it was a<br />
sideways job jump within AT&T itself. I went from having the<br />
education group, which was about eight people, to corporate<br />
communications, which is about 100 people and a huge budget. I was<br />
responsible for all of the marketing communications for the whole<br />
Bell system. Not advertising.<br />
<br />
We had seminar centers, put out all kinds of educational pamphlets,<br />
even a magazine for our customers on how to use the equipment. I<br />
was doing that. It's a big job. It's a 50 hour a week job. Creative<br />
Computing was halfway down the block. I'd go there at lunch time,<br />
see how things were doing.<br />
<br />
As I said a little bit ago, when it looked like we were going to<br />
hit a million dollars I said I've got to get serious about this.<br />
That's when I resigned from AT&T. That was probably the first, I<br />
shouldn't say the first, but that was a major problem with my wife<br />
at that time. You're leaving AT&T? You're leaving all those<br />
benefits? What are you doing, you idiot? We were on the downward<br />
spiral at that point and then the embezzlement just sealed the<br />
whole thing.<br />
<br />
Leaving any job for an unknown thing like you started a little<br />
company and you leave your day job. You're making a real<br />
commitment.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Even once you were at Creative full time, it looks like you did a<br />
lot of everything. You were writing, you were doing programming,<br />
you were being the editor, the publisher and the editor which is<br />
not done anymore.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. I don't know. You can correct me. I don't think I was a<br />
control freak.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. You had Phil Ellenberg. You had just hired Phil Ellenberg as<br />
the advertising manager. Richie was doing it. Where did he come<br />
from? He came from some respectable place. He came from some<br />
respectable place, Phil Ellenberg.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, he did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was like a real person who had a real job, not like the rest of<br />
us. He was the ad manager. I think once you made the step to leave<br />
AT&T then you mostly concentrated on the editorial. You weren't<br />
selling ads and writing and you had Steve North who was doing a lot<br />
of the editorial.<br />
<br />
David: At the beginning, yeah. The thing is I'd be lying if I said I knew<br />
how things were going to go, I knew this was going to be a huge<br />
magazine some day. I had no clue. When I started Creative Computing<br />
there weren't even personal computers at that point. I was<br />
convinced, I guess, that they would come about. I had no idea that<br />
it would be three months later that the Altair came about. It was<br />
more that I thought that an educational magazine like we had been<br />
publishing at DEC should continue.<br />
DEC had dropped off. They stopped publishing Edu when I left the<br />
education group. Well, they published an issue or two but they<br />
really weren't serious about continuing it. Then you had all of<br />
these people out here in the west coast, the Hewlett Packard<br />
computers. They were publishing some good software, they had some<br />
good arrangements with Minnesota Educational Computers Consortium<br />
and some others to distribute stuff that they developed, but there<br />
was no information source for schools and teachers and kids that<br />
were using computers.<br />
<br />
That's what I envisioned initially, but then once the Altair and<br />
the others came out people buy this kit computer and say what can I<br />
do with it? We've got these programs that will run.<br />
<br />
Betsy: First you have to steal Basic.<br />
<br />
David: What?<br />
<br />
Betsy: First you have to steal Basic.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I noticed that, I don't know what it's called, the public opinion<br />
or I don't know the word, this part here. The number one magazine<br />
of computer applications.<br />
<br />
David: That was a Davis thing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It started off first issue a non-profit magazine of educational and<br />
recreational. That was November 1970. May/June 1975 the words non-<br />
profit disappeared.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He never set it up as a non-profit.<br />
<br />
David: I did not.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You started making a profit.<br />
<br />
David: That's right. [laughs]<br />
Betsy; It was the unintentionally non-profit.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Three years later it quietly changed into the number one magazine<br />
of computer applications and software.<br />
<br />
David: That was when Ziff Davis took over.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Really? No, that was '78.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, that was '78.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, '78.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He stayed until the end.<br />
<br />
David: Right. OK. You're right. Who knows. We changed it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It seemed like a good idea at the time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's clearly a shift from education to education plus other things.<br />
<br />
David: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think it was when he realized that if you really wanted to make a<br />
profit you had to leave education behind because teachers want<br />
everything for free, or they certainly did then.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They have some websites for teachers. They still do. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Schools, teachers, yeah, they want everything for free and they get<br />
a lot for free. Places like Huntington Computer Project. There was<br />
one out here, Oregon. Yes, there was. I think it was based right<br />
here in Portland. It would have been, right, if it was in Oregon?<br />
Yes, there was a computing consortium at that time, Hewlett Packard<br />
oriented.<br />
Then you had People's Computer Company down in California that was<br />
sort of providing stuff to schools. They were mostly into<br />
alternative schools and there were a lot of them in the Bay area at<br />
that time. In fact, there was a magazine or a newspaper, big thing,<br />
I don't know how often it came out, called the "De-school Primer".<br />
<br />
It was for people that...I won't say they were hippies but<br />
basically homeschoolers but they got together and said, "We're<br />
going to educate our kids outside of the public education system<br />
but we don't want to do it individually. We'll get together." There<br />
was a big movement there and they were into computers, unlike the<br />
public schools back in '75, '76.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Homeschooling back then was very avant-garde. It was not approved.<br />
<br />
David: Not like today. The shift away from education. That, of course, was<br />
partially driven by the hardware that was then available to people<br />
at home.<br />
When I first started the magazine, I had four editors over the<br />
years, five I guess, but Steve Gray had been publishing a<br />
newsletter, what he called the "Amateur Computer Group Newsletter".<br />
It was for engineers who were scavenging up old parts from<br />
Honeywell and IBM and GE and DEC and trying to put together a<br />
computer. You've got success stories and here's how you can make<br />
this worth together.<br />
<br />
That was a long way away from an Altair, but that's what I was<br />
focusing on, people that were doing that and education. Changed our<br />
focus. You're right. Good observation.<br />
<br />
Kevin: After that, do you feel the focus changed in the next 10 years?<br />
<br />
David: The focus changed largely due to selling the magazine to Ziff<br />
Davis.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When's that?<br />
<br />
David: We were negotiating for a while and I think the sale finally went<br />
through in '83. Yeah, '83. Maybe late '82 but roughly then. They<br />
felt that you need more of a business focus, small business and<br />
people running businesses out of their home. That's where it<br />
started but then we got into real small businesses. I shouldn't say<br />
real but a store front or a small manufacturer, something like<br />
that. That's probably a direction we would not have gone. I<br />
wouldn't have gone on my own.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had a magazine called "Small Business Computing." Remember?<br />
<br />
David: That's right, we did. I would have kept Creative more targeted on<br />
the home market and still education, to some extent, but more on<br />
the home and people that were running a business, a single<br />
entrepreneur. You could review a spreadsheet or a small business<br />
computer or higher end printer or something but not lift it up to<br />
that next level up.<br />
When you're owned by somebody else and they say this is what we<br />
want to do you've got to be responsive to it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Why did you sell? Was it something that had to be done? I've read<br />
the official line.<br />
<br />
David: I think the official line is pretty close to the real line. What<br />
happened is the first magazine, maybe not the very first but the<br />
first sizable magazine, to sell was the Byte and they sold to<br />
McGraw Hill. Then there were three or four other sales. At the time<br />
there were maybe eight special interest publishers in the country.<br />
You had Hurst and CBS magazine and Ziff Davis. Maybe eight serious<br />
ones. There were some others that were, "Oh, it'd be nice if we<br />
could get into it."<br />
What happened is all of us at that point were spending maybe<br />
$100,000, $150,000 on circulation promotion. McGraw Hill says we<br />
want to get out there, we're going to spend a million dollars.<br />
They're mailing 10 times as much as we are. They're going to trade<br />
shows with big, elaborate booths and handing out all kinds of...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Free magazines.<br />
<br />
David: Not only free magazines but other stuff. That was half of it. The<br />
other half, which was probably more than half, was the advertising<br />
sales. We were using reps. We had different reps in different parts<br />
of the country, paying the rep commission on the advertising. When<br />
you are a McGraw Hill or a Hurst or a Ziff Davis you've got an in-<br />
house staff. They would have a reception at one of the computer<br />
conferences, a big deal.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We used to have a hospitality suite at the hotels in some of these<br />
conferences and then we would bring little hunks of cheese that we<br />
cut up from home and sneak the bottles of wine up the back stairway<br />
and they were having these big things with the giant balls of<br />
shrimp.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. It was just an order of magnitude different than what we<br />
could do. What happened, really, was that it got to the point where<br />
there were only three, really two, serious bidders that were still<br />
looking for a magazine and there are still about four magazines,<br />
four decent quality magazines, on the market and one was Compute,<br />
one was Interface Age. Personal Computing had just sold, there was<br />
us, and I forget who the fourth one was. There was four.<br />
<br />
Kevin: There were more magazines than buyers at this point.<br />
<br />
David: That's right. There were a lot more magazines, too, but there were<br />
four major players. One of the buyers, I didn't really regard them<br />
as serious, and that was Atari. I think they wanted to back into<br />
the thing. The two buyers left were CBS, and they had a magazine<br />
division at that time, and Ziff Davis and that was it. I said,<br />
"Man, I've got to make a deal here." That's what happened.<br />
I look back with hindsight. I said the guy, Robert I forget his<br />
last name, that owned Compute magazine, he held out. He held out<br />
until the end and he said, "I'm better than Interface Age," and he<br />
was and whatever the other one was, Family Computing, "I'm better<br />
than them." He got a really nice payoff from CBS because it was the<br />
last one and they wanted him. I don't know. If I had held off a<br />
little more would I have gotten more? Probably.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How much did you get?<br />
<br />
David: Can we publish this figure?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't know. I don't think we ever have.<br />
<br />
David: No, we never have.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's my chance for a scoop.<br />
<br />
David: Pardon?<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's my chance for a scoop.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] I'd rather not say. I can tell you Compute, if you ever<br />
read that number, which you will, it was seven times that much. It<br />
was huge. Huge. At that point, I think CBS just said we've got to<br />
get into this. We've really got to do something. The big loser was<br />
Bob Jones at Interface Age. He had a good magazine. That was a<br />
good, solid magazine. Bob Jones, he went to shows, he was always in<br />
a suit and tie. He would have fit into the corporate environment<br />
very well but he held out too long. I think he was holding out for<br />
even more.<br />
That's what I was afraid of. Less than a year later he was out of<br />
business. There was no way you could compete with these big guys.<br />
Ziff instantly started having these receptions at PC expos.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They had ad reps all over the country.<br />
<br />
David: Ad reps, yeah. Oh my gosh. We would not have survived.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Again, you [inaudible 00:41:03] .<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Not exactly right but yes. Wasn't bad. Wasn't bad.<br />
<br />
Kevin: But Ziff didn't have it for very long before they let it go. It was<br />
only a couple of years.<br />
<br />
David: It was almost four years. Three and a half years. They did a study,<br />
and this is one of the classics. I've been making a presentation at<br />
Leslie Park last year on the 10 biggest blunders in personal<br />
computing, and actually it's up to 12 now. One was, and I still<br />
feel that it was huge, is that Ziff Davis analyzed that market in<br />
'85 and determined that the home market, the market for home<br />
computers, had reached saturation. Five percent of the homes have a<br />
computer. That's it.<br />
There were three things, three major conclusions from their survey.<br />
I think probably one and a half of them were pretty good and one<br />
and a half were just absolutely wrong. The home market reaching<br />
saturation, wrong. The second one was that they said that the<br />
magazines that would be successful would be those that were focused<br />
on specific brands of computers. Are you getting all that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: With the IBM PC it really brought standardization to the industry.<br />
Their analysis was that Apple and PC were going to be the dominant<br />
players in the future and in that they were right. They said we've<br />
got to have a magazine that's just focused on those two and they<br />
did. What was their Apple magazine? They had two Apple magazines.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A+.<br />
<br />
David: But they also had the one for the Mac.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mac User.<br />
<br />
David: They had two Apple magazines and then PC. PC they spun off a whole<br />
bunch. PC Week.<br />
<br />
Betsy: PC Junior.<br />
<br />
David: A bunch of them. In any event, they were right in that. The other<br />
one that they were semi-right, in the long term future they were<br />
totally wrong but in the short term future they were probably<br />
right, and that they looked at...We had been covering bulletin<br />
board systems. CompuServe, whatever its predecessor was, basically<br />
online type of stuff.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Genie.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. They said that's just a flash in a pan, online stuff. Well, in<br />
'85 it was. It took a while. It took another 8 to 10 years for that<br />
but then oh my God. You know what's happened today. If they had<br />
stuck with Creative Computing and rather than trying to make it a<br />
small business focused magazine but kept the home and the online<br />
focus we would have owned the Internet market today, absolutely<br />
owned it. It would have been a bigger magazine than all the others<br />
put together. Hindsight is 20/20.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I know it wasn't your choice but do you have regret about that?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: At the time it was devastating.<br />
<br />
David: Absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was like someone killing your child.<br />
<br />
David: At the time, we sat in these meetings up in Stanford, Connecticut,<br />
of all places. The reason for that is Bill Ziff. What happened in<br />
the interim a year or two after they purchased Creative Computing<br />
and PC, Bill Ziff came down with cancer really big time and was<br />
afraid of dying next year. So he was moving all of his resources<br />
and the holdings outside of New York to avoid really major<br />
taxation. I'm not sure that Connecticut was much better but he was<br />
splitting them between Connecticut and Florida. Anyway, we wound up<br />
having a bunch of meetings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was trying to maintain residence in Connecticut.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I guess that was it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was living in the Crown Plaza.<br />
<br />
David: I remember the last one. We were up at the hotel.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Crown Plaza. It was Stanford, it wasn't Harvard.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, Stanford.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I said Harvard.<br />
<br />
David: When they finally came and said we're going to shut this down. That<br />
was a devastating time. We probably could have continued to work<br />
for Ziff if we had been willing to go into New York but when you<br />
get used to working a mile or two from where you live the idea of<br />
commuting into New York, who knows what the job would have been.<br />
Bye. That was it. That was, in retrospect, a mistake.<br />
The other thing that happened as a result of Bill Ziff having this<br />
bout with cancer is that Ziff Davis sold off all of their other<br />
special interest magazines. Popular Boating, Popular Photography.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yachting, Modern Bride.<br />
<br />
David: They had a big group of travel magazines. Actually, one of the<br />
things they did after Creative Computing was to shut down...we got<br />
friendly with the publisher and some of the people in the traveling<br />
division and we started doing some freelance travel writing.<br />
I was writing a monthly column for one of the travel magazines that<br />
went to travel agents on automating your travel office and so on,<br />
which was an interesting thing because there's a small business<br />
that really depended upon computers with the reservation systems<br />
and all the airlines had a different reservation system. You had to<br />
have Saber.<br />
<br />
A lot of them would go with one and make an agreement with somebody<br />
else to make their other reservations. In any event, it was a bad<br />
system and I was writing a column on how to make this work for you.<br />
As you know, I don't know how many months later we got into the<br />
Atari camp.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was your next gig?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. It was Joe Sugarman, remember, that hooked us up with Atari.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I thought it was Neil Harris.<br />
<br />
David: He was the one we worked with but it was Sugarman.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because he came from Commodore. I didn't know it was Joe Sugarman.<br />
<br />
David: He ran a company called JS&A for Joe Sugarman and Associates. They<br />
were the first one that took these full page ads in lots of<br />
different magazines and the quarter page...<br />
<br />
Betsy: The first advertorials.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, advertorial. The first print advertorials. Really serious<br />
stuff. Out of that, he spawned at least a dozen other companies.<br />
Sharper Image is a Sugarman and it's a spinoff. They've got a whole<br />
page just focused on this air ionizer or some crazy product, but he<br />
sold tons of that stuff. Then he started offering courses. He was<br />
on the verge of doing some big deal with Atari and so he knew all<br />
the people out there.<br />
I had taken his course and started running the ad. In fact, there's<br />
probably one in one of those issues that is basically a Sugarman<br />
ad. And so anyway, you took the course, too. So we got to know him.<br />
He got to know us, and we kept up. And, oh, OK. Creative Computing<br />
has folded, and I'm trying to get something going with Atari and<br />
getting their magazine really serious. And so he was the one that<br />
hooked us up with them. By the way, I'm surprised that you don't<br />
have Atari Explorer on your website<br />
<br />
Kevin: On the website? Well, the deal with my Atari magazines website is<br />
I've always strove to get permission. Atari can't be owned by the<br />
same company for more than three months at time.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's hard to get permission that way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You can't get permission. But it's out there, elsewhere. There are<br />
other archivists who don't bother to get permission. That's another<br />
good way to do things. Yeah, it's out there. I think Archive.org<br />
has it.<br />
<br />
David: Really? Yeah, because I hadn't seen it. I was looking for<br />
something...I still get inquires every once in a while from<br />
somebody that wants something in one of the previous magazines that<br />
we've published.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That's why I don't' risk it. There's a few magazine that I just<br />
absolutely would not, because it's owned by some giant monolith<br />
corporation now, and they need to hold on everything even if it's<br />
30 years old.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because someday they might be able to make money from it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right. That's why that's not there.<br />
Talk to me about...You did some weird stuff. The weird stuff I'm<br />
thinking of is the board game.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: "Computer Rage."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We just saw that. We might not have even remembered what it was it,<br />
but we saw it last night at the museum.<br />
<br />
David: They have one in the Collection's area of the Computer Museum. They<br />
didn't even know that we published it. I thought, "Look at this."<br />
<br />
Kevin: You did Computer Rage, which was weird; I want to ask you about<br />
that. You did the record album.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The record album made way more sense than the game.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, well it was a guy named Allan. He was a colonel at that time<br />
and he came to see me with the idea for the computer game.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I forgot about that.<br />
<br />
David: He was a colonel in the Army and had something to do with<br />
educational programs. The Army said people should know more about<br />
how computers work and everything else. He said, "The games that<br />
are on the market are pretty tacky and not fun. I've devised<br />
something." We worked together with him. We finally decided, "All<br />
right. We'll publish this game. By the way, he's a general and<br />
finally retired.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But he's not financing his retirement with [inaudible 00:54:29] .<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: No, not at all.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Will anyone buy this?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We did overprint.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't a big seller or big success, but we sold enough of them.<br />
Now the record was a little different. There was a guy named Dick<br />
Moberg who, at the time, was the president of the Philadelphia Area<br />
Computer Society. The first two personal computer festivals were<br />
actually in New Jersey, not the west coast. The West Coast Computer<br />
Faire came later with Jim Warren and that group. John Dilks started<br />
this computer festival in Atlantic City. This was before Atlantic<br />
City was a big casino place, but...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well, it was a casino place, but...<br />
<br />
David: ...but it was pretty tacky.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It still is.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Not like now.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not like now where it's so classy.<br />
<br />
David: In any event, they were having some issues with the hotel and the<br />
convention center in Atlantic City. Dick Moberg said, "We people in<br />
Philadelphia can do a better job than you guys in New Jersey." And<br />
he got together with what was his name? Lenny? And<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh! Saul Levis.<br />
<br />
David: Saul Levis, who was the president of the New Jersey amateur<br />
computer group. The two of them got together and said yeah, it'll<br />
be more convenient if we do a thing in Philadelphia. And Saul<br />
Levis, he had put together the first Trenton computer festival. It<br />
wasn't a big huge thing; it's gotten to be gigantic. In any event<br />
they said OK, we'll do this. At that point, this was '78; the Apple<br />
had just come out and people were making little plug-in<br />
peripherals.<br />
There was a company that...I'm not going to be able to remember who<br />
it was. They made a nice little plug-in board for the Apple. What<br />
they had was a very nice thing on the screen where you could<br />
position notes and then have them played back. So it was a visual<br />
programming of music.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Music Construction Center?<br />
<br />
Betsy: There were ads for it in magazines.<br />
<br />
David: No, it was a guy out of Denver. I don't remember. Anyway, before<br />
that everything had appeared line by line. But there were some<br />
reasonable playback systems that were starting to come on the<br />
market for the S-100 bus. There were about four of them. The<br />
programming was a little bit harrier, but nonetheless they sounded<br />
OK. And then there was still the leftovers in a sense that people<br />
that were doing work on mainframes to process music.<br />
So Dick Moberg said, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could get a number<br />
of these together?" And of course there's the Philadelphia<br />
Orchestra, we'll make it a Philadelphia Computer Music Festival! So<br />
it was largely his idea, but then, how do you publicize it? Well,<br />
you've got this magazine that's in your backyard, that was willing<br />
to recruit some people and publicize it. So we got about...I don't<br />
know at the festival there were probably 25 or 30 people that had<br />
stuff.<br />
<br />
They recorded it all, which in retrospect was a bit of a mistake<br />
because they had problems with one of the two channels in the<br />
stereo. They had the big reel-to-reel tape recorder, one of the<br />
channels was seriously too low. And then they said, "Well, we've<br />
got this wonderful tape; what are we going to do with it?" And I<br />
said, "Well, I'll do something with it."<br />
<br />
I hooked up with a studio in the city that made records, and we<br />
went in there and corrected the low channel a little bit, not<br />
totally, but enough that it sounded like stereo. And put together a<br />
vinyl record!<br />
<br />
I edited out a lot of the poor quality performances, made the<br />
record, and that sold! It sold pretty well. Our biggest problem was<br />
shipping. How do you ship a 12-inch vinyl record without it<br />
breaking? But that sold pretty well. That, of course, died off<br />
along with everything else when Creative Computing got killed by<br />
Ziff. But, I still had the original test pressing of that, the<br />
original, original.<br />
<br />
I played it back, and it sounded very good. Put it into, I forget<br />
what the software was, but, it was one, the digital routine. It<br />
would have been nice if I still had the original tape, but, I<br />
didn't. But, OK, it's got a little bit of deterioration, going to a<br />
record.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, we're not talking about losing overtones of a<br />
violin up at 15,000 hertz. It was within a narrow band, to begin<br />
with, in any event. But that did let me totally correct the left<br />
channel and bring it up to what it should be. I put that out. I'm<br />
selling CDs now, of that.<br />
<br />
In fact, a guy from Australia ordered one, and obviously, the<br />
postage to send anything overseas is a lot more. He said, "Why<br />
don't you just make MP3 files out of it?" Because, they're WAV<br />
files, the way they are now. I go, "OK."<br />
<br />
This is very recent, like within the last couple of weeks, I<br />
downloaded some software, "Convert WAV to MP3," converted it, sent<br />
them the files. They said, "That's great." What I think what I'll<br />
probably do is try to figure out how I can make them available from<br />
a website.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You've apparently forgotten that, like, 10 years ago, I did that.<br />
They're there.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. I know.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They're at vintagecomputermusic.com.<br />
<br />
David: Are they MP3s?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Well, then, I don't have to do it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You dummy.<br />
<br />
David: Bam. I did remember. I didn't know that you did them all. I thought<br />
you did a sample.<br />
<br />
Kevin: No. They're all there. I can see you're getting reflux.<br />
<br />
David: Boom. I wasted a little time. I waste a lot of time, these days.<br />
That was a cool thing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just think it was neat that you guys were willing to take chances<br />
with weird stuff.<br />
<br />
David: Where we took chances with really weird stuff was in the software.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Software publishing?<br />
<br />
David: We had a brand called, Sensational Software. Unfortunately, Ziff<br />
decided it was competing with some potential advertisers, which it<br />
was, in a sense. They killed it off. But, we had some really good<br />
stuff. We had the Apple game, what the heck was it? It was ported<br />
directly over from the arcade games.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Was it, "Space Invaders"?<br />
<br />
David: "Space Invaders."<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was a clone of, "Space Invaders"?<br />
<br />
David: It was the real.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You got it from, Jeff Lee's guy.<br />
<br />
David: Because, "Space Invaders," the Japanese game, was one of the first<br />
full-sized console video games where they used a general-purpose<br />
chip. "Space Invaders," was programmed for the 6502, Apple.<br />
We bought it from this Japanese company, and we had the only real<br />
"Space Invaders" game. That was one, and a couple of others that we<br />
really could have gone places with. That was just about the time<br />
that Ziff came in and said, "Nah, you can't have this anymore."<br />
<br />
They were into printed media, so, they kept the books going, but,<br />
not any of the other stuff. The other thing we had, was, speaking<br />
of computer music, a little division, that probably could have<br />
gotten a lot bigger, called Peripherals Plus. We were marketing a<br />
little computer music board, it was an S-100 bus once. But if we<br />
had then...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Didn't we have a plotter, too?<br />
<br />
David: Yep. We had about five or six interesting, low-level products. But,<br />
again, Ziff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That stuff was really competing with the advertisers.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Obviously, that wasn't our intent. But, yes it was. We also<br />
offered courses at that time. Do you remember, at County College?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't.<br />
<br />
David: That was just at when we moved into the new building at Hanover. We<br />
had two people that were doing that.<br />
<br />
Betsy: One of them was that crazy, Larry guy. He was seriously weird.<br />
<br />
David: County College of Morris, we reached an agreement that we would<br />
teach their Introductory Computer course. Not for their day<br />
students, but they offered evening courses, adult education, we<br />
were doing that. Fingers in a lot of pies, at that point.<br />
Actually, from that standpoint, it was, probably, good that Ziff<br />
got us a little bit more focused, and back to the roots of<br />
publishing. Getting spread a little thin.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You went to Atari, got the Atari game, and you did the "Atari<br />
Explorer," right?<br />
<br />
David: "Atari Explorer." They had had an occasional publication, not<br />
really a magazine, but one that was focused on the games, and they<br />
decided that they could start that one up again. It started up with<br />
a new name. We called it, "Atarian." It was focused, basically, on<br />
video games. You buy one of their video games and you get an issue.<br />
Anyway, there were different ways that they were going to promote<br />
it.<br />
But, a year later Nintendo just, absolutely, buried "Atarian," in<br />
'89. They kept Atari Spore going for, I think, two more issues,<br />
right?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Was it two?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember the details.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't much.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I remember why they killed it.<br />
<br />
David: Ms. Feisty here. Come on. You've got to tell the story here.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They were playing games with our printer. Production schedule.<br />
Everybody had a production schedule. We never missed our production<br />
date, getting things to the printer, getting them mailed. We just<br />
did it because that's what you had to do. I will probably get sued<br />
for this. Atari started not paying the printer and the printer says<br />
we're not going to print this until we get paid. The date kept<br />
slipping and slipping and the subscribers would be calling up and<br />
saying, "Where's my magazine?"<br />
This went on. It was bi-monthly. It went on for maybe six months. I<br />
finally wrote an editorial in which I explained to the readers<br />
exactly what was going on. They didn't see it until it was printed.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
David: That didn't get into the magazine, though.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It did.<br />
<br />
David: That's right, it did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They never saw it. We were producing it out of [inaudible 01:10:07]<br />
New Jersey and printing it in eastern Pennsylvania and they never<br />
saw it until it was too late. My tenure was cut short but I didn't<br />
really care at that point. I was sick of them. It was really hard.<br />
They're not easy people to deal with, even when the owners last for<br />
more than three months. That was my suicide by editorial. The only<br />
time in my life I've ever been fired.<br />
<br />
David: I didn't realize they didn't read that beforehand but I should<br />
have. I should have.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] I probably wouldn't have gotten fired if they had.<br />
<br />
David: That was the straw that broke the camera's back.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But then John [inaudible 01:11:05] kept doing it a little bit.<br />
<br />
David: I know. In a lot of cases, particularly with the games magazine,<br />
they wanted to approve everything that went in it. If you do an<br />
objective product review, you call it like it is. Oh m gosh, there<br />
was one, it wasn't just one product but a roundup after Consumer<br />
Electronics' show, and I don't remember what it was. Atari had<br />
brought out some new products that really weren't ready to go.<br />
In some cases I just said, "I'm not going to say anything about<br />
this one or these two or three. I'll focus on the ones that are<br />
ready to go or are in good shape." Oh my gosh. "What about this?<br />
This is a wonderful thing." "Well, maybe it will be but it isn't<br />
yet." We had issues all along on censorship and them changing what<br />
we had written and everything. As Betsy said, they were not nice<br />
people to work with. I forget, the two brothers.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Trammell.<br />
<br />
David: Trammell, yeah. That came from Commodore.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Jack and somebody else. Jack and his brother.<br />
<br />
David: It was interesting because yesterday I saw Nolan Bushnell. He was<br />
at that event. Nolan was flamboyant, but basically he had integrity<br />
and he was an honest guy. Man, oh man. Didn't stay and the<br />
corporation changed after he left.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Then you're done with Atari and then it's straight to military<br />
vehicles there?<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] No.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was a hiatus.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, man. We published magazines, in-house magazines, for a couple<br />
other organizations. Did one for Nabisco called...I don't even<br />
remember but it was for their marketing department. Published that<br />
for some period of time and then they decided to bring it in-house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was more like a newsletter.<br />
<br />
David: It was 16 pages. It was getting there.<br />
<br />
Betsy: 16 pages is a newsletter.<br />
<br />
David: All right. Magazine format. Let's put it that way. We did some<br />
fulfillment. Basically, a lot of freelance writing on the travel<br />
field.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Stuffed dogs. The stuffed dogs. Remember those four dogs for my<br />
brother?<br />
<br />
David: That's fulfillment. Fulfillment for Con Edison. I published a<br />
couple newsletters for a while, one called "Effective Investing"<br />
and one called "Effective Communication" for writers. We're talking<br />
early '90s.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was when people still cared, thought that there might be a<br />
correct way to do something and they wanted to know what it was.<br />
<br />
David: That was focused on "Take this computer and start to use it as a<br />
tool. Don't be afraid of the thing." '91/'92 not everybody was<br />
using a computer yet or a personal computer. That was the<br />
orientation of that. Then the other thing we got into big time was<br />
we'd been involved with a local rescue mission for men with drug,<br />
alcohol, homeless issues and we were writing and producing their<br />
newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We were producing all of their fundraising material.<br />
<br />
David: We started, I think, with the newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, we did everything. Appeal letters and newsletters and<br />
maintaining their database, the donor database. It took a lot of<br />
time.<br />
<br />
David: We did that for five years. Then '96 I got an opportunity to buy<br />
this crazy military vehicles magazine for people that were<br />
restoring old historic military vehicles. It was a magazine but it<br />
was I guess more of a glorified newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was horrible.<br />
<br />
David: It was horrible but it was really terrible. In fact, the editor or<br />
the publisher, whatever, the owner, he'd take the articles however<br />
the writer would send them. If it was double spaced type, boom,<br />
that's what would appear in the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Save all the typesetting.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He had zero typesetting expense.<br />
<br />
David: Zero editing. He just took anything that came in, put it in. Ads<br />
the same way. Half the ads were hand written. Well, not half, but a<br />
significant number had corrections on them by hand. Oh my gosh. It<br />
was so terrible. I made it into a real magazine and built it up. At<br />
that point the circulation had been about 10,000. We built it up<br />
and we were pushing close to 20,000 magazines. It was a real<br />
magazine. I sold it to Crowsey publications.<br />
Then they, which I did not realize at the time, the owner, Chet<br />
Crowsey, had put the whole company up for sale and he sold the<br />
company a year or two later to some other specialty magazine<br />
publisher. We're talking narrow, narrow niche. They published a lot<br />
of, what'd they call it, white tail bow hunting. Really, really<br />
narrow stuff. Up in northern Wisconsin is where they were based. In<br />
any event, he sold it.<br />
<br />
The new publishers, their whole stick was making money. They<br />
immediately raised the subscription price of military vehicles. We<br />
were charging $18 a year which was fine and they raised it to<br />
$21.95 or something and they raised the advertising rates and<br />
everything else.<br />
<br />
The last I knew, the circulation was back down around 10,000.<br />
[laughs] It doesn't pay off to take that approach. I didn't have<br />
the same emotional connection, with that as I did with Creative<br />
Computing and the other magazines there. Fine, you do what you want<br />
with the magazine, it's OK.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You didn't care too much?<br />
<br />
David: Nah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What do you guys do now? It seems like charity work and [inaudible<br />
01:19:45] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. I run a non-profit called Beyond the Walls and he runs his<br />
website and does Bible studies.<br />
<br />
David: Right. Actually, Betsy, the organization she has, she's executive<br />
director of Beyond the Wall, that's gotten huge.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's getting bigger and bigger.<br />
<br />
David: It's gotten huge.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think huge is probably an exaggeration.<br />
<br />
David: Well, not huge like a Gates Foundation thing.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I wish. We started in 2005 with 26 volunteers going to Guatemala to<br />
work with this organization that works with the people who scavenge<br />
in the Guatemala City garbage dump. The dump is in a ravine. It<br />
started in the early '50s and as it has filled up around the edges<br />
they put a couple layers of sand on it and let it sit for a bit and<br />
then the people build houses on it out of scraps and things that<br />
they made.<br />
This organization called Potter's House that we work with has been<br />
working with them for 26 years. They have an education program,<br />
micro-enterprise and health and various things that they do. Since<br />
2005 we've been sending volunteer teams. We're not the only ones<br />
sending volunteer teams down there to build houses and do<br />
healthcare and do stuff with the kids. So we started with 26 and by<br />
the end of the year we'll be well over 150 volunteers. We'll have<br />
three weeks this summer, I'll have 135 over three weeks this<br />
summer.<br />
<br />
It started in our backyard and one of the reasons that we wanted<br />
to...It started in the church and we started the organization<br />
partially because it's easier to raise money if you're not a church<br />
and it's also easier to make the volunteer opportunities available<br />
to people. If you say "Oh I'm going to Guatemala." "Oh I'd love to<br />
go with you! Who's going?" "It's my church." "Oh."<br />
<br />
But, if it's this local non-profit it's more appealing and we've<br />
really succeeded in doing that because we have people not only from<br />
in our own community, but this year we're going to have a family<br />
from Oklahoma, about six families from Texas, several people from<br />
Florida.<br />
<br />
David: You got the Virginia.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Virginia. It's like oh my goodness. How is this happening?<br />
<br />
Kevin: And everyone goes out to Guatemala and does the [inaudible<br />
01:22:31] ?<br />
[cross talk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. We all meet in Guatemala. I have three teams. One each week,<br />
and I'll be there the whole time and they'll come down and probably<br />
each team will build two or three houses. They'll do medical<br />
clinic, they'll do day camp for kids, soccer or baseball, sports<br />
things.<br />
They were about teenagers, so they love to do the...Everybody does<br />
construction in the morning. Then, in the afternoon teenage girls<br />
and some of the boys who want to do other stuff will help out with<br />
these other kid-related activities. That's what I'm doing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My wife is in Africa this week and last doing something similar.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Cool.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Which is why I have to leave shortly to go get my kids.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: What part of Africa is she in?<br />
<br />
Kevin: She did some stuff for Special Olympics. Then, they were helping<br />
build something at a food bank. I don't know that much yet, because<br />
she's not home yet.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Cool.<br />
<br />
David: That's terrific. She'll be changed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: She keeps telling that she wished I could've come, and I do, too.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You have this kid. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: We've got the two kids. The six-year-old doesn't feed herself real<br />
well.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: She can't drive to school.<br />
<br />
David: Your annual budget has gone from 0 to what? Are you going to hit<br />
about 150, 200,000 this year?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's over 300 already.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, OK. [laughs] 300.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's small potatoes compared to...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: As my boss, the Chairman of the Board, and I'm the only employee,<br />
is fond of saying, "The people out there don't realize that we're<br />
just a bunch of schlumps sitting around a table making this stuff<br />
up as we go along. Very good leadership. He's a very good leader.<br />
<br />
David: We were trying to maybe see if we can touch base with the Gates<br />
Foundation when we were up there. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: We got a brochure into his hands.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we got a brochure into his hands and some other stuff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was Bill Gates there?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah. I had a picture of him that I had taken at the first<br />
Altair convention in 1976, before he had actually made the deal<br />
with Altair to develop BASIC. He had said, "I can do it," but they<br />
hadn't signed the whole thing. I've got a picture of him as a 20-<br />
year-old or thereabouts, talking at this little convention.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You showed it to him?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. I gave him a copy. The problem I had is that...some people<br />
keep everything. I pretty much give everything away.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, you are lying. You keep everything.<br />
<br />
David: I do keep a lot of stuff. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Then, you give it away later. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Well, when Stan Freiberger was putting together the "Fire in<br />
the Valley" book, I gave him a lot of photographs and I gave him<br />
the originals. Then the publisher said, "It's not good enough. The<br />
photo. You get the negative." OK, they're gone. Never any of that<br />
came back. In fact, what I had to do is scan the photo from the<br />
book to make the print to give to Bill.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Photos of being young and cute.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was his Woody Allen phase. He looked exactly like Woody Allen<br />
did at that phase in his life.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:26:30] too.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm sure there is.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It is a lot [inaudible 01:26:33] .<br />
<br />
David: She improves with age. Every year.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I saw the picture! You look the same.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, the instant Paul Allen showed up, of course, everybody's<br />
mingling around this museum. All of a sudden there was like an<br />
arrow head over in that direction.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was this sucking sound.<br />
<br />
David: And then Bill shows up and, oh my God, everybody has to go see<br />
Bill.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was talking to Bob Rynett this morning, the guy who organized it,<br />
and he said, "Oh, Paul was very happy. Paul was very pleased with<br />
the way the event went." He said his only regret was that he and<br />
Bill didn't have enough time to spend with the people. And I'm<br />
thinking, "Well, OK, if you just stayed a little longer."<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Well, at least Paul Allen did come to the dinner.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, he stayed a little longer, but Bill, he was in and out like<br />
a...<br />
<br />
David: Bill was there for maybe an hour.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He just showed up because he had to.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, exactly. It was a cameo.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:27:52] cameo there?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, yes. There I am. I was thinner then. Oh! There's Ted in his<br />
hat! And Peter [inaudible 01:28:02] . Who's that guy?<br />
<br />
David: Dick Heiser was at the convention and he had one of the hats. The<br />
Xanadu hat.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was wearing one of those hats. The rings were actually silver.<br />
Oh and there's Johnny Anderson. He's the one that wrote that<br />
crazy...<br />
<br />
This was our building.<br />
<br />
David: That was the greenhouse garage building that we started. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: And there was a hole. Was it you or my brother that made a hole in<br />
the wall for an air conditioner?<br />
<br />
David: It was your brother.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And the building was painted white after...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is that the air conditioner? You comment about the low tech air<br />
conditioning.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, that was in an actual window. This building had been painted<br />
white after and right about here a hole had been made in the wall<br />
for this through-the-wall air conditioner. It was rented and when<br />
we moved out, we had this hole in the wall. So, my brother takes<br />
this spare ceiling panel that we had. It was white and sort of<br />
stuffed it in the hole and filled it up so that it really didn't<br />
show any more. We never heard any more about it.<br />
<br />
David: That building today is...<br />
<br />
Betsy: They've made it very fancy.<br />
<br />
David: Oh my gosh! It's a boutique shop and it's really nice. And they<br />
didn't even tear it down. It wasn't a tear-down and rebuild. At any<br />
event, we were not into spending money on facilities. Absolutely<br />
not. The last place that we were in was a printing company had<br />
owned it and they had taken three very small houses that backed up<br />
to railroad tracks and then they built a large warehouse at the end<br />
that was relatively modern. Then they just connected the three<br />
houses with little walkway and so we were in the first house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You couldn't tell that it was two houses.<br />
<br />
David: No. The art department was in the second, then the software group<br />
was in the third one. We had our fulfillment and storage and stuff<br />
in the warehouse.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How much money did you spend on the facility?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not much.<br />
<br />
David: We were spending money on expansion, growing, grow, grow. Then Ziff<br />
Davis comes in, they say, "You got this wonderful warehouse."<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's our warehouse now, right?<br />
<br />
David: That's right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It wasn't though, because you owned it.<br />
<br />
David: I know, but in any event, they said we're going to use it. We're<br />
moving some of your operation, advertising, sales into New York,<br />
therefore you will have more space. It wasn't the trade-off of the<br />
same kind of space or anything. What they did is, they have all<br />
these other magazines at that point, things like "Popular Boating"<br />
and "Yachting" and everything else. All of those magazines, when<br />
you subscribed you got a premium. You got a tote bag or something.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A backpack or a cushion.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. They moved all of their premium fulfillment out to our<br />
warehouse. They said, "Because you're not going to have a software<br />
department anymore, so you won't have to ship any software. We're<br />
going to bring all of our premiums out there." We still have<br />
"Yachting" bags.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yachting bags and seat bags.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Speaking of fulfillment that was something that we did. We were<br />
real pioneers in doing our own fulfillment.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: That's true...<br />
<br />
Betsy: All magazines then used fulfillment houses. You would just send all<br />
the little cards and white mail and everything to your fulfillment<br />
house and they would just take care, enter it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Reader service cards and...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Exactly, and then they would send the labels.<br />
<br />
David: Everything went either to Boulder, Colorado, Des Moines, Iowa, or<br />
some place in Florida.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So when you say pioneers, does that mean you were cheap?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well no, because we were not getting good service, we weren't happy<br />
with the service the readers were getting. And so we decided to<br />
bring it in it house, and we brought a program from a company in<br />
Boston that had written a program to run a PDP11.<br />
And we did we brought the whole thing in-house. We had our own data<br />
entry people. Did all the caging, taking the money out in-house.<br />
Printed our own labels and ship, because then you had to print them<br />
and ship them because there was no electronic delivery.<br />
<br />
David: You know we were real pioneers there and we did spent some money.<br />
Because PDP1170 was not a low-end, with a platter and disk, 12<br />
inch, maybe 15 inch, but a big, big platter drive, and data entry<br />
terminals, DECWriters, VT05. And when Ziff came in, I mean they<br />
were blown away that we were doing our own fulfillment, and doing a<br />
very efficiently.<br />
And the other thing we were doing also was the reader service<br />
cards. We were doing all our own processing of that. The same<br />
computer is same system. A Mini Data System, that's what it was.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No.<br />
<br />
David: No? OK.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mini data was the one you were using...<br />
<br />
[Day 2]<br />
<br />
<br />
David: A couple of the questions you asked yesterday got us to thinking<br />
about things we probably should have mentioned or clarified.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK let's go, let me grab a pen.<br />
<br />
David: One of the corrections, Betsy remembered better than I. the<br />
embezzlement that we were talking about was actually 79 not 78 it<br />
doesn't make a lot of difference but was a year later. It was a<br />
year after I had left my day job, and I was really depending upon<br />
Creative Computing for my income and everything else. So to lose<br />
that was a big blow at that time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So that could have been the end of things right there?<br />
<br />
David: Yes absolutely it could have.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was 79 not 78, is what you're saying.<br />
<br />
David: That's what I said it was 79 not 78.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I was going to ask you to move closer to the microphone.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Actually I don't have to do this. My ego is completely uninvolved.<br />
I would go sit and play with the cats.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Please, please be here. You supplement Dave's memory.<br />
<br />
David: Yes exactly she's very good at that.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: I want to know, how are you going to know how to spell things? He<br />
used the name John Dilks. If you go to write it out, how do you<br />
know how to spell John Dilks?<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'll either Google it, and if it's not in Wikipedia, I'll have to<br />
come back to you and ask, or if they're mentioned in the magazines.<br />
I'll do my best.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm not saying it in a critical way, I'm just impressed that you<br />
don't ask.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just feel this way, I can have everything. I don't have to write<br />
it down. I can concentrate on the conversation, rather than taking<br />
notes.<br />
<br />
David: OK. One thing I thought would be kind of worthwhile...putting the<br />
whole era of the early computer magazines into a perspective. In a<br />
sense, personal computing itself went through several eras as it<br />
accelerated and became so widespread. It certainly didn't start<br />
that way.<br />
You almost have to look at a period before there were personal<br />
computers -- the pre-personal computer era, which I would say would<br />
be 1972 or so up through '75, when the first computers came out.<br />
What was happening then was you had big time-sharing systems.<br />
<br />
Then, manufacturers like DEC and HP were making smaller time-<br />
sharing systems for terminals on a computer. Specifically, Bob<br />
Albrecht opened up People's Computer Company down in San Carlos,<br />
San Mateo, one of the "Sans." It was an open to the public place.<br />
What were people going to do with computers? Well, he wrote this<br />
book of what to do after you hit return, of games.<br />
<br />
Then I wrote my book, not for his center, but for people in the<br />
east that had access to the same type of things on DEC computers.<br />
Those two books actually came out in '72. That was well<br />
before....There was an impetus for people to use computers. Even<br />
though it was mini-computers and they didn't really have their own,<br />
they did have access.<br />
<br />
That, I think, was an important thing because, then, when the kit<br />
computers first came out, which is '75, we really had the kit<br />
computer era from '75 to around '78. That's when it primary was,<br />
the do-it-yourself, build-it-yourself.<br />
<br />
Who did those computers appeal to? It was largely people who were<br />
OK with things like soldering guns. That was largely HAM radio<br />
people. You look at "73" magazine and "Radio Electronics," those<br />
were the ones that dragged the hardware people into the field, and<br />
"Popular Electronics," of course, with the Altair in January, '75.<br />
<br />
You had to know something about, and be a little bit capable with<br />
your hands to get into it. That continued but dwindled off by 1980,<br />
because of course, in '78, you had the three biggies, not biggies,<br />
but self-contained, assembled computers: the Commodore PET, TRS-80,<br />
and the Apple all came out in '78. They were proprietary platforms,<br />
nobody was sharing stuff.<br />
<br />
Actually, the S-100 bus was more shareable. More people got a card<br />
that you could plug into the S-100 bus. There was more, but on the<br />
other hand, you had to build it. That was really a stumbling block<br />
for a lot of people. Then processor technology with the SAL. OK,<br />
here's an S-100 bus machine, but it's all built. That was a big<br />
leap.<br />
<br />
Anyway, you had the, what I call, proprietary era from '78 to '82.<br />
Then it kind of dwindled off, although Apple certainly kept going.<br />
When the IBM PC came out, '81, '82, '83, that ushered in the<br />
standardization era. Everybody, "OK, we're going to make an IBM PC<br />
clone." It was really only Apple, and to a lesser extent, the Atari<br />
and the Commodore that kept going with their own proprietary stuff.<br />
They really couldn't keep going.<br />
<br />
At that time, we started working with Atari. They using the same<br />
chip that Apple had. I thought, "Man, that's an opportunity. Why<br />
don't they just make an agreement with Apple to run Apple software<br />
and everything." They got a 6502, that family of chips in there,<br />
why not? But that wasn't Atari's way of doing things, as you well<br />
know.<br />
<br />
In any event, they went through those stages. As a new one came<br />
along, the other one died off. That though then affected the<br />
magazines, Creative Computing, we came from the pre-era, in a<br />
sense. From the education applications and people having access to<br />
small, minicomputer time sharing systems. When Altair basic was<br />
announced, then it was the obvious thing that we would port over<br />
programs to that.<br />
<br />
Other magazines such as "Byte" and some of the hardware magazines,<br />
they really came from the HAM radio end of things. Wayne Green, who<br />
started "Byte," was publishing "73," which was the biggest magazine<br />
in HAM radio. HAM fests were one of the earliest places where<br />
computers were, or at least hardware, do-it-yourself computers were<br />
really seen and popularized. Wasn't till a little later that we had<br />
computer festivals.<br />
<br />
The real early computer festivals in '75, '76, had a big overlap<br />
with Ham radio. The early ones in New Jersey. That was the earliest<br />
ones. It was, I think, more, not more, but at least half was<br />
oriented to Ham radio. Then, it broadened out, of course, with more<br />
applications being reproduced. Anyway, I think it's kind of<br />
important to know how things fit into that whole scheme of things.<br />
<br />
Magazines either came from the Ham radio and hardware side of<br />
things. They had a different perspective than those like Creative<br />
Computing.<br />
<br />
Well, Peoples' Computer Company, Bob Aldberg, could have had a real<br />
winning magazine, but he was too much in the alternative mode. So,<br />
Peoples' Computer Company never really made it as a magazine. He<br />
didn't want to do advertising or anything that would...<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was a different avenue. It was more like a tabloid-style<br />
newspaper.<br />
<br />
David: Newspaper, yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was more glossy.<br />
<br />
David: Exactly.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was a very different field.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Again, magazine publishing. I remember, early on, I was on a<br />
TV show. McNeil Lehrer Report on Public Broadcasting. Life Magazine<br />
was being re-launched and Time-Warner was spending a ton of money<br />
on this re-launch. They had the publisher of Life Magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was probably Time-Life back then. I don't think it...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. That's right. It wasn't Time. Well, I think it was close to<br />
the time that they merged. Anyway. Yeah. It was Time-Life. Then,<br />
they had me. Sort of the opposite extreme.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You're going to be covered in cat hair by the time you're here.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, I am sure.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's OK. But it matches and sort of goes with it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. It matches fine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You have kind of a theme here. The black and white.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes. Yes. Sorry to interrupt.<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, they were interviewing both of us. They were going to spend<br />
more money on their first issue than our entire annual budget, for<br />
everything. The difference in big publishers, because we we're<br />
talking about that a little bit yesterday, is huge. Really huge.<br />
Now, the interesting thing is there was a magazine back then. I<br />
don't know if it's still around today, called Folio. It was a<br />
magazine for magazine publishers. They covered all aspects of it.<br />
Subscription fulfillment, typesetting and everything else and the<br />
business aspects of running a magazine.<br />
<br />
They had some figures, which were true for a long period of time.<br />
That one out of seven magazine startups makes it for one year. One<br />
out of seven. That's low. Of those, one out of seven makes it for<br />
five years. So, were talking about...<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think Wayne told me almost the exact same statistic.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. One out of 50 new magazines makes it for five years or more.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: Once you make it five years, you're probably good to go for awhile.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
The new Life Magazine comes back, roaring back in. Where are they<br />
today, or even 10 years later from that point. Gone. Didn't make<br />
it. In any event, yesterday we were talking a little bit about<br />
where did we put all our money.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
David: Well, all our money wasn't an awful lot compared to big publishers.<br />
We were a small player. We're big in that field, but...<br />
<br />
Kevin: You're a big fish in a little bowl.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Yeah. There wasn't a lot. Betsy reminded me this morning that<br />
one of the things we did to, in a sense, keep control, is we bought<br />
our own typesetting equipment.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Used of course.<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Used.<br />
<br />
David: Used. Yes. We didn't want to send stuff out to a typesetter<br />
where...what did you [inaudible 00:14:22] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was the same thing with the fulfillment. You are sending it to a<br />
service that gives your work to a minimum wage person who couldn't<br />
care less. Puts her time in and...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Plus you still had code and things that needed to be done right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Done right. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Otherwise it was useless.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. We didn't typeset the code usually. We would actually pace<br />
down the printouts. Part of it was for efficiency and probably, in<br />
the long run, it was cheaper. Just to turn your typesetting around,<br />
send it out and wait for your galleys to come back. Then you<br />
proofread them. Then you'd send it back. Then they make the<br />
corrections maybe and you get it back again. So we said, well...and<br />
then we got this used, copy graphic was it?<br />
<br />
David: Mm-hmm. Yep.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Typesetter. Found a young woman who knew typesetting and hired her.<br />
We bought our own stat camera. We always used to have to send all<br />
the stats and [inaudible 00:15:34] out to be made.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: That was huge then before...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Had our own darkroom.<br />
<br />
David: ...everything was computerized publishing. Yeah. We had our own<br />
darkroom and our own stat camera with the thing that goes over a<br />
screen basically to make it into dots.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: To do that. To make those negatives or [inaudible 00:15:56] , which<br />
are the positive. That was something again. You sent it out and you<br />
get it back.<br />
I said, "Oh, you know what, we got a little more type here than<br />
expected. We want to crop this. Well, we send it out again, and oh<br />
my gosh." Doing all of that in-house, but it cost money. In a<br />
sense, just for the hardware and capital improvements that you<br />
needed to do that.<br />
<br />
We were spending it on that and expansion into other things like<br />
the software. One of the other ones that I was thinking of that we<br />
did, that certainly, really didn't bring us any tangible reward,<br />
was that we were doing some consulting when we started developing<br />
software. We started doing consulting to places like the<br />
Exploratorium in San Francisco. And Sesame Place. That was a big<br />
one for us.<br />
<br />
Sesame Place was a theme park right in our own backyard in New<br />
Jersey. They were going to have these terminals that you could go<br />
up to. One of the programs was Mix and Match the Muppets. You could<br />
take different parts of Muppets and combine them. We wrote a part<br />
of that routine and a whole bunch of stuff that made computers and<br />
these things not computers but approachable things for kids.<br />
<br />
We did some work for the Capital Children's Museum in Washington<br />
and Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Again, did it help us?<br />
Maybe. Did we gain a little reputation? Maybe. Did it translate to<br />
the bottom line? Probably not. As Betsy said, it was fun for you to<br />
do that, wasn't it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, it was fun. It gave him fun things to do.<br />
<br />
David: That was one way that we, in a sense, spent some money.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It makes sense. You guys were the computer experts, probably by<br />
orders of magnitude. Who are they going to go to?<br />
<br />
David: That's right. Interactive games, yeah. I already had a good selling<br />
book out there that was visible, known. We did a lot of that kind<br />
of stuff. Some of it was just fun to do. Another place where we put<br />
I won't say a lot of money but we went to a lot of these shows,<br />
well, there were some that were strictly personal computer shows,<br />
but then also tried to push into things like the consumer<br />
electronics show.<br />
We were the only magazine at the consumer electronics. That's a<br />
huge, huge show. Twice a year, one in Chicago and one in Las Vegas.<br />
We'd take the smallest booth that you could but, still, it was a<br />
fair chunk of change to go to that, but that's how I felt we got<br />
the reach. They were pushing at a lower level. That was video games<br />
mostly at that point. Although we weren't in that market, I just<br />
felt that that was someplace that we wanted to be.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you think that was worthwhile?<br />
<br />
David: I don't know. We were mainly looking for retail stores to sell the<br />
magazine. That was my main purpose for going there. No, it probably<br />
wasn't. It probably was not and it cost us a lot of money to go to<br />
the shows. You have to experiment and do those things. We started<br />
reporting on new developments at the consumer electronics show and<br />
there was some overlap with Computer Inc but it was mostly video<br />
games. No, it didn't have a real good payoff. [laughs]<br />
Then there was the Boston show we went to where Betsy's feistiness<br />
really came out. You go to those shows. I'm not talking about one<br />
of these local computer shows or something. You go to a big show.<br />
You've got to use union labor. We had a computer at our booth. We<br />
wanted to plug it in. You're going to plug in your computer? No,<br />
you can't plug it in. You've got to hire an electrician for an hour<br />
for $75 to plug in your computer.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was a bit extreme. I don't think that was actually true.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know how much it was but you had to use union labor for<br />
different things. Betsy took exception to that at one show and<br />
actually came to blows.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was carrying stuff off the show floor. We were trying to get out.<br />
It was in Boston and we were going to drive back and we were trying<br />
to...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Go home at the end of the show?<br />
<br />
Betsy: ...go home at the end of the show. We were just carrying our<br />
cartons of leftover magazines and books and some union guy comes to<br />
me and starts telling me you can't do this and he was being very<br />
rude. So I punched him in the arm. [laughs] They were not happy.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you have to hire a special punching person to do that?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yes, exactly. I should have consulted with the shop steward before<br />
doing that.<br />
<br />
David: There was a follow-up to that. I'm not absolutely sure but I think<br />
the guy that was running that show was Shelley Adelman. He then<br />
approached us after that little incident. You can't do this. Betsy<br />
was really in his face about come on. We're a tiny little nit. Sure<br />
we can do it. We can carry our own stuff.<br />
Shelley Adelman, whose name you probably heard today, in a sense,<br />
got his start by running these smaller shows around the country and<br />
then he built up to running PC Expo in New York and Las Vegas and<br />
then he got into you run a show in Las Vegas you've got to make<br />
deals with the hotels and so on.<br />
<br />
The earlier PC shows in Las Vegas did not use the convention<br />
center. They were held in I think probably the Hilton. He got to<br />
know hotel people there and he started buying into hotels and today<br />
Shelley Adelman is huge. Not Caesars but he owns one of the really<br />
big casino operations. He's on Forbes list of top 100 wealthiest<br />
Americans.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sure he only uses union labor.<br />
<br />
David: I'm sure he does, absolutely. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's how he got where he is.<br />
<br />
David: We've crossed paths with some interesting people in different ways.<br />
There was another one I was thinking of. Actually, this is jumping<br />
around a little bit. Editorial, in different people submitting<br />
articles and then some people I would ask would you do something<br />
for us early, early on. That's another thing we went to. I went to<br />
comic cons and the sci-fi cons to promote the magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was early.<br />
<br />
David: That was early, very early. I've got to tell you one little<br />
incident there. I also went to small press publisher conventions. I<br />
went to one over Labor Day weekend, and I don't know what year it<br />
was. It was probably '75, '76 maybe. The place that they gave this<br />
small press to exhibit was one platform up in the subway under<br />
Lincoln Center.<br />
Lincoln Center, of course, huge, but down one level is not shops.<br />
There may be a few shops but it was a big, open platform. That's<br />
where we were exhibiting. I had my magazines out there on a table<br />
and I was talking to these other underground publishers and so on,<br />
typical.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's why they put you there. It's underground.<br />
<br />
David: Underground, yes. It was a Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Saturday,<br />
Sunday, Monday. I said, "I can't be here on Sunday." Talked to the<br />
person next to me and I said, "I'm just going to leave a cigar box<br />
that says put your money in the box." He said, "You're nuts. We're<br />
in a New York subway system. You're going to come back with nothing<br />
in your box." I left a bunch of change in it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: And your ex-wife said you were too trusting.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] Yes. I left like 15 single dollar bills in there so people<br />
could make change and I just left it there, from Saturday to Monday<br />
and I came back Monday, about $40, $50 in the box. I don't know<br />
whether it paid for everything that was taken but it worked out<br />
fine. Yes, I was obviously too trusting, but at roughly the same<br />
time there was something going on. I think it was a sci-fi<br />
convention or world future society. Yeah, it was world future<br />
society convention.<br />
They had some notable people there. I was sitting down with Alvin<br />
Toffler in the lobby of the Colosseum and along comes over to us<br />
Isaac [inaudible 00:27:03] (ED: from context, they are talking about<br />
Isaac Asimov). What a wonderful little party. We had some coffee in<br />
the Colosseum and I said, "Isaac, can you write me an article?"<br />
"I got a good story from the robot series that hasn't been widely<br />
used or published and you can use that." So I got an early <br />
contribution from Isaac [inaudible 00:27:27] and Alvin<br />
Toffler wrote something for us.<br />
<br />
Anyway, got to know some interesting people at that point. Then who<br />
should submit an article, and by this time Betsy was the editor...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Out of transom comes an article from Michael Creighton. It was a<br />
program. I can't remember what it was about.<br />
<br />
David: For the Apple.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was a program for the Apple, but it was something really dumb.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know if you remember, we were reminded when Harry Garland<br />
was up at the thing in Seattle. Harry Garland was one of the first<br />
ones to produce an independent manufactured a board, a 100 bus<br />
board, for the Altair, and this was really early, and he called it<br />
the TV Dazzler. It made little squares light up but he could make<br />
lots of them light up in different colors or just a few. It was a<br />
silly program but people said we can do graphics on this.<br />
He eventually developed it into quite an interesting graphics tool,<br />
I guess. People did buy the TV Dazzler for itself but the purpose<br />
was here's a board you could produce graphics, do some graphics. In<br />
any event, that's essentially what Michael Creighton's program did<br />
for the Apple. Not much.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This was not early on.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, it was after the Apple 2 was out.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was probably...<br />
<br />
David: '80.<br />
<br />
Betsy: 1980, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you publish it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. I rejected it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: I'm like we're going to reject an article from Michael Creighton?<br />
<br />
Betsy: We both liked Michael Creighton as an article.<br />
<br />
David: Oh my gosh. But we did. We really did. We had standards.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Later on, though, he wrote something. It was better. It wasn't<br />
great. He did write something better and we did accept it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Orson Scott Card wrote for Compute, I think. I don't know if he was<br />
Orson Scott Card at that point, but [inaudible 00:30:00] .<br />
<br />
David: We've crossed paths with some people.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [inaudible 00:30:09] was actually very nice<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, 6 foot 8, big guy. He was very nice. Unfortunately, he died.<br />
On the other end of things, early on, we really were...this was<br />
probably even before Betsy got in...kind of in the small press<br />
underground publishing movement as much as in the legitimate big<br />
magazines, because that's kind of where I started.<br />
<br />
Betsy: When I came, we had just published the first sleek, coated paper<br />
magazine and coated stock. In October 1978, I believe, that was<br />
published. That was the first of the coated stock. That was kind of<br />
the bridge to legitimacy.<br />
<br />
David: For the first two years, [inaudible 00:31:09] news print and I had<br />
a little tie in with some of the small press people. I was learning<br />
about publishing from small press review, I got to know some of the<br />
people who were doing successful publishing. A lot of them were<br />
magazines and comics out of San Francisco.<br />
So I got to know a little bit [inaudible 00:31:46] and Gilbert<br />
Shelton and Sherry Flannigan, and some of those early, Bobby<br />
London. So anyway, one ad we ran real early on was an adaptation of<br />
Renee and Robert Crompton. Go ahead and change my thing to creative<br />
computing. Go for it. Sherry Flannigan she did a comic strip called<br />
Tronch and Bonnie, Tronch was a little dog and Bonnie was a little<br />
girl and they occasionally got mixed up with a robot dog.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there some sort of falling out with that person?<br />
<br />
David: With Sherry? No. I'm still friends with her on Facebook. They had a<br />
major, major problem, she was involved with Gary Hallgrin and I<br />
forget who the publisher was, McNeil, Bobby London. They were the<br />
Air Pirates funniest group that Disney took to task, that caused<br />
the death of a lot of publishing in the underground comics<br />
movement.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I don't understand.<br />
<br />
David: Air Pirates were funny, they were just looking for trouble. They<br />
had Disney characters flying planes and getting into all kinds of<br />
trouble and getting into problems that Disney characters never<br />
would have done, sexual problems as well as just acting badly.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Disney just said, "We can't put up with this." It was an<br />
interesting case, because was it a copyright violation, not really<br />
because they were character look-a-likes, but they weren't calling<br />
them Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck but they looked the same or very<br />
similar. But, it was a landmark case in underground comics, it<br />
caused a lot of them to pull back, a lot on the satire and stuff<br />
that they were publishing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I asked about Sherry because a number of years ago when I had first<br />
put the best of [inaudible 00:34:29] on my website, then after a<br />
while I got an email saying, "Look, you have to take this<br />
[inaudible 00:34:37] ." I would copyright all, it was just like<br />
waving arms. So I took it down but it was, I thought, maybe it<br />
was...<br />
<br />
David: Well that whole copyright trademark thing, there interpretation<br />
that really, really strict...everything that goes on the Internet<br />
is a public domain. Well, that is not really true either. Are you<br />
making money from copyrighted material? If you are then that's a<br />
pretty clear violation. Are you affecting the copyright owners<br />
ability to make money with it? That's a violation.<br />
I'm kind of in this right now with Uruguay and TinTin, those books<br />
have inspired a lot of people to make parodies and fake TinTin<br />
covers. TinTin at the beach, places TinTin wouldn't normally go.<br />
Well is it affecting the sales of TinTin books, or is it actually<br />
increasingly them?<br />
<br />
Casterman, who owns and [inaudible 00:36:07] owns the TinTin<br />
copyrights. They are really going after some of these people, but<br />
I'm not sure that they have a really good case. So some people take<br />
everything off and don't want nothing on the website. And others<br />
are saying, "Hey, this is legitimate." I have collected a lot of<br />
those covers, and put them up on a website.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I guess you'll find out soon enough.<br />
<br />
David: I will find out, soon enough.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They may not be right legally, but how hard do you want to fight<br />
it.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: I think that they have to demonstrate that it's hurting them in<br />
some way. One last thing, from the question you asked yesterday,<br />
back to the money issue, when I sold the magazine, right at that<br />
time I took 15 percent of what I had received, and donated it to<br />
charities. I have in a sense signed on, although not as an official<br />
signee to the Gates-Buffet initiative to give away half of my<br />
wealth, while I am alive.<br />
At one point in time you can compute that, I have already given<br />
away more than I have received for Creative Computing to Charity.<br />
Of course, it had grown a little bit and we made reasonably decent<br />
investments and that is why it continued to grow. But, I'm really<br />
committed to doing that. My kids are not going to inherit it all.<br />
That's just the way it is, that is the way I believe. Put my money<br />
where my heart is. Anyway,<br />
<br />
Kevin: Other question is, you said something yesterday, I should follow up<br />
that one. You said something about stealing Basic.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well there was this big thing. Just the night before last, at this<br />
dinner we went to, where all the people who were at the first MITS<br />
conference and they referred to the letter that Bill Gates wrote.<br />
<br />
Kevin: "Why are you stealing my software?"<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well exactly. That was just a reference to that Bill Gates, which<br />
had just been brought back to my memory by that. People were<br />
telling stories at this. Instead of having an after dinner speaker<br />
they were just passing the mic around and people were talking about<br />
incidents and things from the past.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you get to sell the story to this group of...?<br />
<br />
David: Not really, I was just followed up on something [inaudible<br />
00:39:24] .<br />
<br />
Betsy: Some of those stories were really boring.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: Oh yeah, long and boring. It's an interesting thing though, about<br />
basic itself, but it was developed at an educational institution<br />
originally by Kemeny and Kurtz at Dartmouth. And they, either<br />
deliberately or because they had gotten a lot of grant money from<br />
General Electric in the early time sharing systems, they basically<br />
let anybody use their Basic.<br />
It was developed at Dartmouth but later Honeywell put a system in<br />
at Minnesota or Florida or someplace else. They could use Basic,<br />
they could have a no license fee or anything. That made Basic a<br />
universal language that was available, at least that version of<br />
Basic. If you write a different version of Basic, where does that<br />
fall? These are some sort of violation and you need some<br />
permission. And basically Kemeny and Kurtz said, "No, you don't."<br />
And they allowed Basic to be used and developed by others.<br />
<br />
Digital Equipment, at the same time, maybe even earlier, but<br />
roughly the same time, had developed also an interactive language<br />
called Focal. And Focal in many regards was more efficient than<br />
Basic, because they were running it on many computer and there was<br />
less memory to work with. On the other hand, and this was true<br />
Digital...as time went on, they said, "No, nobody can use Focal. We<br />
are not going to let, especially those people [inaudible 00:41:59]<br />
." But any place else, nobody could use Focal.<br />
<br />
I think it wound up with a situation like Sony and Betamax. Sony<br />
saying, "Betamax is ours and it is a better format that VHS," which<br />
it was. But then, JVC saying, "We have VHS and Toshiba. Hey do you<br />
want to use it? Fine, we'll license it to you for next to nothing."<br />
<br />
Kevin: You think Focal could have been Basic.<br />
<br />
David: I think it could have been very big. I think it could there could<br />
have been very serious competition between the two languages, but<br />
by Digital limiting it only to their own computers and specifically<br />
to their mini computers, not even the big mainframes, it really<br />
limited the spread of Focal. In fact, it forced me to go out to the<br />
developers and people in educational institutions they wanted<br />
Basic.<br />
There were few schools and colleges in Boston area, near DEC that<br />
were OK with Focal. But stuff was getting published by Minnesota<br />
Educational Computer Consortium and others in Basic, [inaudible<br />
00:43:32] computer project. So they wanted Basic. [laughs] I had to<br />
go on. I hired one group, actually it turned out to be just an<br />
individual guy in Brooklyn that developed a Basic for 4KPDP8. Well<br />
Basic took 3.5K, I gave you 500 words, 512 bit not even the 16 bit,<br />
at least get 2 bits per...but 500 words the right programs. Wasn't<br />
much.<br />
<br />
So that forced Lunar Lander and [inaudible 00:44:15] and some of<br />
those programs actually. Some of them I imported over from Focal<br />
into Basic. And then we had a machine that had 8K. We had a<br />
different version of Basic because Hewlett Packard had a machine<br />
that read cards, mark sense cards. We had to have a different<br />
version of basic for that. Then we had a timeshare Basic. We had<br />
six versions of Basic, five actually on the PDP8 family. It was<br />
absurd, it was crazy, but we had to do it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I was going to ask you, the process of like...you started<br />
saying...you interrupted yourself. You said, "People would submit<br />
articles and then..." I don't know what you were going to say next.<br />
But [inaudible 00:45:08] that I wanted to ask you like just the<br />
process of how the magazine got made. You got an article was,<br />
somebody just typed up or something and...<br />
<br />
Betsy: You mean the mechanics of the production?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We can receive most of the articles for the magazine came over the<br />
transom. And we would get these articles and our editorial system<br />
would log them in and pass them around to editorial staff. John<br />
Anderson and Russell [inaudible 00:45:42] .<br />
<br />
David: Peter Fee.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Peter Fee.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What does it mean over the transom?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Means they weren't solicited. Somebody in the middle of the night<br />
jumped to know [laughs] or through the mailbox. We put a little<br />
piece of paper on there and the guys would write their opinions.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] That is serious.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Some of the things they said. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Like what? What would they say?<br />
<br />
Betsy: "Don't quit your day job." [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: And then they had the rubber stamp.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Somebody found a stamp. Everything that we had was used, including<br />
our desk and everything. And somebody found, at the back of the<br />
desk, a stamp. It said San Marcos on it. This was like the ultimate<br />
insult. [laughs] San Marcos, like you know, "Get out of here."<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Send it to San Marcos?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Send it to San Marcos, wherever that was. Ultimately, I would make<br />
the final decision whether we were going to publish this or not.<br />
Once we were well established, the vast majority of them went back.<br />
We never returned manuscripts. And they would come with piles of<br />
code. A lot of them were programs and, we would decide and the<br />
editorial assistants job to notify the person. Then we bought all<br />
rights, didn't we?<br />
<br />
David: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
Betsy: North American Serial rights, that's what we bought for everything.<br />
Then they would go into a cube. Sometimes we would say something,<br />
"Oh, this is going to go really well with this educational<br />
institute that we're doing in June," Like that one is for June or<br />
just put it in the queue and we will see when it comes or rises to<br />
the top or whatever.<br />
The more technical editors like, John Anderson, he was our best guy<br />
ever. They would go through the code and make sure the code worked,<br />
and I would edit them for content and correct them.<br />
<br />
David: For English and Grammar.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, with a pen and pencil. Then they would go to our typesetter.<br />
Typesetter would correct them. And then they would come back, and I<br />
think, our lower level editorial assistant would proofread them,<br />
but proofread a lot of them too. When they came out typesetter, it<br />
was on a smooth shiny paper.<br />
<br />
David: Photographic paper.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And then, if they had screenshots or anything the art department<br />
would make them into photo stats or [inaudible 00:49:02] . And then<br />
when it was time for them to go to press they would put them on<br />
boards, pieces of cardboard, white paper...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So you paste up?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, they do the paste up and put it on there.<br />
<br />
David: The boards were using non reproducing blue on its photograph. They<br />
had different outlines, blue defined columns, both two and three<br />
column pages and upper limits and page numbers and all that kind of<br />
stuff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: We were still doing it on [inaudible 00:49:43] newspaper in 1990.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well that's exactly it, so you know what we're talking about. And<br />
then once you get it all together and then again somebody has got<br />
to read it to make sure there is no lines left out, particularly of<br />
the programs. Make sure that those all still make sense. There were<br />
many cases where line got left out or artists cuts off a things and<br />
realizes, "Oh, I mean to cut it short." And that whole line<br />
disappears and then you send it off to be printed and all the<br />
subscribers get a little upset because Startrek doesn't run.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: So that sort of thing happened frequently or often?<br />
<br />
David: With typeset material, not much at all. But with program listings,<br />
program listings were really tough. Because you would have people<br />
that would submit something, and they'd have a really cheap, low-<br />
end dot matrix printer. And we always encouraged people, if you're<br />
going to submit a program, submit it in some machine-readable form.<br />
So we don't want to type them all in to make sure they work. Even<br />
though our readers are going to have to, but we don't want to have<br />
to do that. So send us. But even so, we might then print it off on<br />
one of our slightly higher end printers. But I'll tell you what,<br />
you have page breaks and everything else. And the Art department<br />
didn't have a clue about programs and stuff. The program would get<br />
stated down. We weren't using the full sized type for program<br />
listings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. At that point we hadn't the ability to make them fit.<br />
<br />
David: That's where the most common place that you'd lose a line or<br />
something. It would get photographed, and when it's coming out of a<br />
line printer, you might have one or two lines on the following<br />
page. "Oh, we forgot that."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Personally, I know it said so much about magazine that when it<br />
continued, there were just sometimes a handwritten area going,<br />
"Continued over here." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Oh, absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was a early.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It wasn't professional, and that was awesome. It was just like,<br />
"OK."<br />
<br />
Betsy: Then what we would do, we would request when we...we would solicit<br />
articles. Like if there was a new Apple peripheral that we wanted<br />
to review, we'd get the product. Then a lot of times, our own guys<br />
wanted to review the stuff, but if it was something that we didn't<br />
have time for, or that was better suited to one of our freelancers,<br />
we would send it out and ask for a review of it.<br />
A lot of reviews came in over the transom too, but we tried to be<br />
careful of those, that they were not either trying to justify their<br />
own purchase of whatever it was or get even with the publisher for<br />
producing it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Or written by the... [crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: That really wasn't an issue at the time, it was a more innocent<br />
time. That really didn't happen much, but it was, sometimes, people<br />
would get a product they didn't care for and totally bash it, then<br />
we have to go and figure out is it really that bad. We tend to not<br />
produce seriously negative...if it was a really bad product we just<br />
ignored it.<br />
<br />
David: We tried to be objective with reviews, but before I got into the<br />
computer field at all I was in market research. There are a number<br />
of biases, too, that really overwhelmingly affect all kinds of<br />
market research polls or surveys. One is that people think they're<br />
better than they are. For example, if we were doing a poll or a<br />
research study, we'd put a question on basically designed to show<br />
the executives who were using this data that there were some<br />
biases.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He's not talking about Creative Computing.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: No, no. This was way earlier. I'm talking about Proctor and Gamble<br />
products or general foods or that kind of thing. Anyways, the<br />
question we put on was "please rank your driving ability," and we<br />
had from well below average, accident waiting to happen up to Mario<br />
Andretti, Danica Patrick, over there. And you know what, 99 percent<br />
of the population ranked themselves better than the average. Where<br />
is your average then? Its way high.<br />
The other thing, equally pervasive in a sense, is that people<br />
wanted to justify a decision, a purchase decision. In fact, back<br />
the 30s, the slogan for Ford Motor Company was ask a man that owns<br />
one. You ask a man that owns and has made a decision to buy this<br />
car, he's going to say "Yeah, it is the greatest car." So you put<br />
on questions, again, throwaway questions.<br />
<br />
If you had this, or if you were an owner of whatever car it is that<br />
you have. "What do you have now? Would you buy another one?" People<br />
"Oh, yes. This is a great decision. I love this car." I'll tell you<br />
where you can find out, is you look at what percentage of people<br />
that did own that particular car did buy another one? They're<br />
always way lower than they those that say they would buy another<br />
one. It gets more pronounced with higher prices.<br />
<br />
If you've made a decision to buy a high-priced car, you're going to<br />
think, "I'll tell you what. This Land Rover was the best car I have<br />
ever bought." 78 percent of people might say, "I'm going to buy<br />
another one." About 15 percent of the people actually do.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So [inaudible 00:56:49] magazine because people want to justify a<br />
review.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. That's exactly right. And as Betsy said, it could go the<br />
other way, too. "I think I'm getting screwed here with this product<br />
and I'm going to knock it." When you get reviews, in essence, over<br />
the transom, they're either justifying, "This was really wonderful.<br />
I made a great decision buying this particular product," or "I hate<br />
it." It's hard to know whether the review was really objective and<br />
realistic.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you ever push-back from advertisers?<br />
<br />
David: All the time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Can you tell me?<br />
<br />
Betsy: We would feel the pushback from our ad sales people. They would say<br />
"So and so is annoyed with you because you didn't put it." We very<br />
rarely put anybody's totally negative reviews, but we tried to be<br />
objective, and not every product is perfect. Almost every product<br />
is going to have some negative feature.<br />
We would put those in and the advertisers would then go to their ad<br />
rep and complain. Then the ad rep would come to us and say, "Why<br />
are you doing this? These people are mad. I have to sell them ads."<br />
We would just say "Separation of church and State. You are<br />
advertising in this magazine because it's a credible magazine, and<br />
if we let you push us around, it won't be credible anymore, and<br />
then it will reflect on your ad."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you remember anyone ever pulling ads [inaudible 00:58:39] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't, offhand. Do you?<br />
<br />
David: No, but I can tell you the opposite. There were a couple of<br />
magazines that almost ran manufactured press releases as product<br />
reviews. They did get more advertising than we did from some<br />
manufacturers that liked that. I hate to name names, but Compute<br />
Magazine. I don't think you'll find any negative reviews in Compute<br />
Magazine. Everything was the greatest thing since sliced bread.<br />
Personal Computing, similar, very positive. "Gee whiz" reviews on<br />
almost all the things that they saw. It just isn't that way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You have talked about [inaudible 00:59:49] . We've talked briefly<br />
at least about the other magazines. Sync, the one about Timex<br />
Sinclair. I understand the allure of publishing a magazine geared<br />
to a specific system, but why did you pick Timex Sinclair? [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Probably two reasons. One is that we had more of a presence in<br />
England than most of the other magazines.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Still do.<br />
<br />
David: We had a very early agreement with David Tebbet, who was the co-<br />
publisher of Personal Computer, something-or-other. It might have<br />
been Personal Computer World. Yes, it was.<br />
<br />
Betsy Ahi: Yes it was Personal Computer World, and when PC world started they<br />
had to call it PC World because there was already a Personal<br />
Computer World in England.<br />
<br />
David: And we had an agreement that they would reprint materials from<br />
Creative Computing, which they did for a while but then they<br />
developed their own in-house capabilities and there was enough<br />
differences. We went to England and very early on had an agent in<br />
England that we could take subscriptions.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A housewife who kept her dark issues in her spare bathroom.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we still know her. Hazel Greaves, Hazy. Anyway, so we were<br />
getting enough subscriptions from England. We were sending over, I<br />
don't know how they packaged them up, but they call them Mbags, M-<br />
bags, mail bags basically of magazines, then we mail them from<br />
England. So I had more of our connection with British market than<br />
probably any of the other magazines, we definitely did.<br />
And so I get to know Clarkson Clair and what's going on over there.<br />
And then when they bring over the computer to this country and<br />
Timex, my God, big outfit. They were going to market it. By that<br />
time you know, there was no point starting a [inaudible 01:02:25]<br />
magazine or an entire magazine. They were, Or Apple, they were<br />
already existed. So maybe this is going to be the next big one. We<br />
will be right there when they start and we were.<br />
<br />
Timex actually put, what we had simple, simple sink or something<br />
but it was in the package with the computer. So that was one way of<br />
getting our subscriber base and we couldn't possibly afford to<br />
advertise and do direct mailings for magazine like that. But they<br />
were in essence helping us go on. So that's why it is pretty<br />
successful actually. Often, we were making money on the magazine<br />
mainly because we didn't have to promote it.<br />
<br />
If we had to get subscriptions, we could not have possibly made it<br />
work. There wasn't enough advertising really. I don't know what the<br />
issue here was, but it was not as good as we would have liked it.<br />
The magazine would have been tiny if we maintained the same<br />
advertising to edit ratio we would have liked. But we didn't lose<br />
money out of it but we didn't make anything out of it either. I<br />
think it was a breakeven proposition.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Microsystems. [inaudible 01:04:09] .<br />
<br />
David: I said there was a lot of early development in New Jersey and there<br />
was a guy named Saul Libes, you will find him probably, [laughs]<br />
who was the first president of the Amature Computer Group in New<br />
Jersey. He was a Professor at [inaudible 01:04:43] College and he<br />
felt that Byte magazine started out fine but then they were<br />
focusing more on assembled hardware and things that were already<br />
made.<br />
So he wanted to get down on really lower level of do it yourself,<br />
build it yourself. Microsystems was more like Byte was in the very<br />
beginning, focusing on circuit diagram, this was logic in PC's and<br />
everything.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There first name was S100, Microsystems<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, S100 perhaps then it became Microsystems in '78 or '79. When<br />
some of the others came out they started [inaudible 01:05:45] 6800<br />
and 68,000 chips from Motorola. But I would say it was a really<br />
techy magazine and it was one that I think probably killed that one<br />
off.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was dead before [inaudible 01:06:05] . [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: It might have been. I don't know, but it was...<br />
<br />
Betsy: S100 bus did not survive and to the [inaudible 01:06:12] .<br />
<br />
David: It was dead before as there was these eras and the do it yourself<br />
S100 era,that was '75 to '78. Then it kind of had a downward spiral<br />
of two or three years and it was gone. Well, maybe it wasn't gone<br />
but it wasn't the same. And so Microsystems was tuned into that and<br />
they were running hardcore stuff.<br />
And the reason that Saul...we reach an agreement with him to<br />
publish it, is basically he didn't have any real magazine<br />
background. We thought we could do something with it. It turned out<br />
not to be a good fit bit we published it for a while. I don't know<br />
if we made money or lost money on that. Probably it didn't make<br />
anything. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Small business computers or computing.<br />
<br />
David: What?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Small business computers? Who do we buy that from? I can't even<br />
remember. You can't even remember that we had it, I can tell by the<br />
look on your face<br />
<br />
David: I can<br />
<br />
Betsy: That one of my brothers...my brother was a publisher remember?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I don't know who or where we got it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That just fall into grave or...?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Eventually, but that we post it for a while. I think is something<br />
that somebody basically left on our door step.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think it was kind of like a puppy on the... [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: I think it came with your brother.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, because my brother wasn't into publishing until after clearing<br />
college.<br />
<br />
David: It sounded like a good idea at the time.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think we saw a future in business computing<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we did and unfortunately that was one word as if they just<br />
want...I mentioned yesterday that they wanted to really shift the<br />
focus of Creative Computing away from home and broaden out and<br />
shifted into the small business market. And just did not, it was an<br />
uncomfortable fit. We would've been better to have a separate<br />
magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember where we got Small Business Computing from or<br />
where it went.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know, either.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But I know that obviously it wasn't a huge acquisition.<br />
<br />
David: It was a footnote.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A footnote in the story. [laughs]<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Actually, a bigger acquisition was earlier and that was Rom<br />
Magazine. Rom was published by who?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Erik Sandberg-Diment.<br />
<br />
David: Right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: D-I-M-E-N-T.<br />
<br />
David: Connecticut. He did a nice job with the magazine, very nice job<br />
with it. Published nine issues and a little different focus than<br />
Creative but it really overlapped us very nicely. He had more<br />
graphic stuff. In fact, it was through him that I got to know<br />
George Baker and some of the people up there. The other guy that<br />
did the pixelated blocks photos. You've seen those.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The Einstein.<br />
<br />
David: [crosstalk] The Lincoln with block pics.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Block pics.<br />
<br />
David: Block pics. OK, he and George Baker sort of came as a package with<br />
Rom, they knew of each other. We actually, I would say, four or<br />
five issues, ran Rom as a whole separate section and even set it on<br />
the cover of Creative Computing and Rom. Then it became evident...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think that was because he had a whole other editorial kicking<br />
around. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We bought.<br />
<br />
David: Could be. And then we would just merge it in completely, but that<br />
was a very good fit. It brought us more editorial than it did<br />
subscribers. They did not have a big subscriber base, but it was a<br />
nice marriage in a sense.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Video and Arcade Games only published I think four issues.<br />
<br />
David: Three.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Three?<br />
<br />
David: Actually, three but if you've got a hold of the third one, you're<br />
doing well. I think Ziff cut that off after two real issues got<br />
mailed out. We did a third one but it wasn't sent out to<br />
subscribers.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My website only has two issues.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. There were only two that really were distributed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So I have...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: A goal. [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, if you can get a hold of the third one. [laughter] I don't<br />
even have that. There's a same thing on Tarry-on. There were three<br />
issues of Tarry-on that I did not keep the third issue. Oh, man.<br />
Shoot me.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: But Video and Arcade Games, there were at least five or six other<br />
magazines focusing on that. Talk about magazines that were running<br />
non-objective manufacture-provided reviews, all the others were. I,<br />
maybe, convinced myself and some people at Davis that there was a<br />
need for really objective...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ziff? Did Ziff do that?<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Were we with Ziff when we did that?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah. That was a late one. So we said, let's...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Continue it through.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, that was definitely. Let's do it. But again...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not only that but it was going to be fun.<br />
<br />
David: It was going to be a lot of fun. [laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: So why did it fail?<br />
<br />
David: OK, again you got to look at the eras and what was happening.<br />
Arcade games then really were on the decline. Video arcades where<br />
you go in and pop a quarter in, because there was so much more<br />
capability in the home computers and the [inaudible 01:12:55] and<br />
the Mattel and the different home systems. They could do all now,<br />
not as much, but you get a pretty darned good game that you could<br />
take home with you and not have to pop a quarter in the slot every<br />
time you play.<br />
So arcade games were kind of on the downward spiral, so that<br />
eliminated a lot of potential advertising. We weren't going to get<br />
any advertising from Nameco and all of the producers of the arcade<br />
games, which was, "Hey, it is advertising along with..." And the<br />
other home producers of the game, there were four or five magazines<br />
already that they were pouring money into. They didn't really want<br />
another one.<br />
<br />
So it was advertising that or just lack of advertising that killed<br />
that off. We just couldn't get it. I think there was still a need<br />
for what we had sort of in a sense proposed to do of objectively<br />
reviewing games and secondly, we're telling people how to play<br />
them.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, it was strategies.<br />
<br />
David: Strategies. It was advertising that we just didn't have, couldn't<br />
get.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:14:28] Atari explored and Atari I think we've covered<br />
pretty well.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Military vehicles, which we talked about.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] Yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So the other magazines, Byte and [inaudible 01:14:45] , was it<br />
rivalry? Was it friendly competition?<br />
<br />
David: Byte, we were in bed together. Not in bed together, but we<br />
published the best of Byte. Creative Computing did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: For awhile.<br />
<br />
David: Well, just one.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. That wasn't that friendly a rivalry. It wasn't that friendly<br />
after awhile.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't friendly once they sold to McGraw Hill, and they sold<br />
early. Then everything was off. We did some joint promotions with<br />
Byte for hardware creative software. We ran the ads for each other<br />
for a short time.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's when McGraw Hill cutoff.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] In a heartbeat. No more of that.<br />
<br />
David: We felt that basically we weren't even competing for the same<br />
advertisers. Just a few, but not really. Certainly, we were not in<br />
direct competition at all with Byte. So that was just kind of all<br />
in the same place and you're going in a hardware direction, we're<br />
going on the software.<br />
When Wayne Green threw this intrigue with his wife and everything<br />
else, lost Byte Magazine. He was fit to be tied. "I'm going to kill<br />
them!" and he started Kilobyte. It wasn't killable. It was Kilobyte<br />
for I don't know how many issues.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not many.<br />
<br />
David: 1000 bytes. [laughter] and a kilobyte, it had a dual meaning there.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: That was a ferocious and very nasty. Oh, horrible rivalry. Somebody<br />
early on forced him not to use the name byte at all.<br />
<br />
Betsy: So it was byte.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: So they changed it to Kilobaud.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Which didn't mean anything.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: No.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So did you have a relationship with Wayne?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Nobody had a relationship with... [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Nobody really had a relationship. I knew him, of course. He was<br />
going his own way. Now the one area actually where we got into more<br />
competition with him than in the magazine itself, because again, he<br />
was trying to be like Byte, hardware oriented and he published 73<br />
magazines so he was basically focusing on the ham radio people, the<br />
do it yourselfers and so on. But they started a software division.<br />
It was pretty good. They had a lot of the same types of software<br />
that we did on cassette tape.<br />
In any event, we really had more of a head to head rivalry on the<br />
software than in the magazine publishing. We never really had<br />
anything to do with the magazine products or books. They also<br />
published some books but more like the magazine hardware type of<br />
thing. We weren't quite as selective, but our book publishing we<br />
did get into things that weren't in the magazine. We published<br />
books with more of a hardware orientation. We had a little broader<br />
line of books than the type of things that we had in the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I don't know if you want to open this can of worms, but you said to<br />
me in an email, "You couldn't find two people whose vision,<br />
philosophy, ethics, and view of business and life was further apart<br />
than Wayne and I." Can you elaborate on that? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was just basically unpleasant, is my take on him. I didn't know<br />
him that well but it was just sort of like he had a chip on his<br />
shoulder and was daring you to knock it off. Wouldn't you say?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You knew him before I did but by the time I arrived on the scene<br />
that was just sort of the general industry perception of him, I<br />
think. It was just stay away from him, leave him alone, he's not<br />
very nice.<br />
<br />
David: Well, one other thing, which we sort of touched on a couple of<br />
times, I'm very trusting. [laughter] Overly so, according to my ex-<br />
wife and I think there would be a couple of examples. Wayne would<br />
walk out of that door, boy, out of sight, 'you're going to do<br />
something to screw him' is what his view would be. He did not trust<br />
anybody.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] And least of all, his ex wife.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: It's the old saying, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean<br />
that somebody isn't out to get you." He thought everyone was out to<br />
get him, everybody. So we were totally philosophically different.<br />
Our ways of doing business were different. I shake hands with you,<br />
we have an agreement. You don't shake hands with Wayne.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't think his employees were ever happy either.<br />
<br />
David: Oh!<br />
<br />
Betsy: You talked to them and it shows. He didn't have like a great...<br />
<br />
David: Rapport.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well it was not. The culture of his organization I don't think was<br />
particularly, I think it was probably permeated with this lack of<br />
trust.<br />
<br />
David: Well, one thing, we had fun. We really did have fun at Creative<br />
Computing. Perhaps some of the editorial staff, too much. There was<br />
one point where Betsy had to away their...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well they were all young guys. Some of them even still in high<br />
school, they would play games for hours and hours and hours, long<br />
after the reviews were done. It was one, self-contained thing that<br />
played football, and they played it for hours. I had to take it<br />
away from them. Like "don't make me be your mother"<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there any drug culture at all? If you read [inaudible 01:22:17]<br />
and he was cocaine and high everyday and popped...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not that we knew of. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: The East coast was quite different.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No there was nothing, really. I don't think so. In fact, my client<br />
John Anderson and Peter Fee, they were actually kind of protective<br />
of me in a lot of ways. I can remember being in John's office and<br />
they were talking about a movie or something like that. John said,<br />
"No, you wouldn't like this movie, don't go to this movie." That<br />
kind of thing, they were funny guys. They just kept laughing. David<br />
Lubar. They were free spirits but they were very funny, talented<br />
guys.<br />
<br />
David: He is coming out with a line of children's books, weird, weird<br />
stuff. The last one, something about the lawn mower weenies. He has<br />
a line of 6 or 8, and they're all little short stories. Some of<br />
them were adaptations of stuff that almost got published in<br />
Creative Computing, probably some of them did. Lubar is a funny<br />
guy. When he left and went to work for one of the video gaming<br />
companies, his first big successful game was "Worm Wars." You were<br />
like, "Worm Wars?" [laughs]<br />
Other people are fighting real serious warrior and you are fighting<br />
with worms. We just had a different kind of culture, a lot of fun.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Jonny Anderson went to work for A+ in San Francisco. He was one<br />
of the five people killed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1986.<br />
He was in a car and a piece of the building fell on the car. He was<br />
a really funny guy.<br />
<br />
David: We did not have a serious business culture.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, we had this great big room with a bunch of tables set up around<br />
the edges, in the middle. It was kind of like that, nowhere near as<br />
neat.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I will clean that up for you.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] Just tangles of wires, and we had to have one of every<br />
kind of computer so we can test all the software, and this one<br />
would be running this kind of peripheral, and it was like a young<br />
guys dream job.<br />
<br />
David: You commented yesterday about how we had a bunch of high school,<br />
not quite, but still...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I said that they were in their early 20s but they basically had the<br />
maturity of high school students, they needed a little bit of<br />
mothering. But I wasn't that myself. They were just really nice<br />
guys, we did a good job hiring those kids.<br />
<br />
David: When you talk about the Atari cultures and some of the others,<br />
where every Friday some of these companies have parties, that kind<br />
of thing. We had an annual party, a picnic. We didn't need weekly<br />
parties and stuff to let you have fun because that stuff was going<br />
on every day, not really partying but playing the games and<br />
bantering and everything else.<br />
As they say, at Washington, a real efficient business culture.<br />
Heck, I didn't work for Digital Equipment, which was still a pretty<br />
relaxed place, but AT&T which was anything but. This is as far away<br />
from that kind of corporate culture as you can get, but it worked.<br />
Didn't make a lot of money, but it worked.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:26:58]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. And I think they appreciated it because they weren't making<br />
tons of money either, but they were having a lot of fun. They<br />
enjoyed going to work, they really enjoyed it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Speaking of Kindle, I've done it but haven't told anybody yet that<br />
best of Creative Computing too is now available on Kindle. And I<br />
have been working backwards. [crosstalk] I just had it on sale.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I haven't publicized it yet for sale.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They won't let you do. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah, I think they will have two.<br />
<br />
David: Did you do that through Amazon? How do you convert is to Kindle?<br />
I scan them and then I do CRM and I use Elance or utilize some<br />
service in India that converts it back to ASCII, and then they<br />
convert it into an E-book from there. It's a lot of work, I want it<br />
done well, and I want it to be super awesome. And they just<br />
[inaudible 01:28:40] , like we were talking about before.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Outsourcing and stuff. But I can do it myself but that would take<br />
way too long. So I just try to do the quality control [inaudible<br />
01:28:49] . It's not perfect but better than nothing.<br />
<br />
David: I have reached the point where with my Dodge restoration book, that<br />
yes, many of the borders around the pictures are terrible, they're<br />
hand drawn and so on. But I'm not going to bother to re-do that, I<br />
just want take the book, get it into some sort of machine readable<br />
format, PDF or something. [inaudible 01:29:24] somebody that can...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah, I can get you off with that. We can then figure it out.<br />
<br />
David: I found one extra one that I can cut up.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That will help a lot. [inaudible 01:29:37] . If you want to sell a<br />
PDF of it, that would be up in couple of day. That's easy, but a<br />
searchable Kindle version that takes longer.<br />
<br />
David: I don't want a Kindle version because people want to print out<br />
something that they can...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Take out to the garage<br />
<br />
David: When people slide under the vehicle they have it there, "Oh, OK<br />
this is what I should be looking for."<br />
<br />
Kevin: If you scan it and upload it to Amazon, even create space from<br />
[inaudible 01:30:06] company, then there could actually be another<br />
book, that looks pretty identical to the first one. We will figure<br />
out.<br />
Do you [inaudible 01:30:23] ? But are you familiar with...?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Are there any?<br />
<br />
Kevin: There are but they are very different than Creative.<br />
<br />
David: Somebody out there said, "What did you read today?" The only<br />
magazines that I will occasionally pick up in the computer field<br />
are mostly from England, Internet magazines, well there are<br />
several, which is sort of interesting that the dominant Internet<br />
magazines come from England, but they do.<br />
If I want to do something, and I haven't lately, but I wanted to<br />
get into doing something different or interactive or something with<br />
my website. I'd pick up one of those magazines and kind of have<br />
same kind of thing that Creative used to publish. Here is a code to<br />
do it in Pearl or HTML, whatever.<br />
<br />
I converted all of my website, quite a while ago, to XHTML from old<br />
HTML. I did not like any of the programs that generate web pages,<br />
mainly because...Well, today its probably OK, but I felt that<br />
earlier on, they were very inefficient. You'd have this much code<br />
for something and XHTML would write it in five lines.<br />
<br />
My old-fashioned [inaudible 01:32:23] said, "You know what, the<br />
interpreter or compiler or whatever, has to go through a lot of<br />
that just to pick out what is going to be displayed." My web pages<br />
are very compact and short. They are all XHTML, none of that is<br />
extra [inaudible 01:32:41] style pages and everything else.<br />
<br />
Anyway, so that's what I'll pick up a magazine for. I'm was doing a<br />
little bit of programming in Pearl and then I said, "No. You know<br />
what, I can get routines that I can download and I don't have to<br />
learn it myself. I learned enough to know that I don't want your<br />
Pearl program." [laughs] Or what is the other one? I don't know.<br />
I'm right at the point now where I'm wanting to do some more things<br />
that I can't, so I'll probably purchase some more computer<br />
magazines and learn about it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Has anyone talked to you about the purchase of PC by Davis?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is a big story.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: She was involved.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was involved. There was a magazine called PC. I was in San<br />
Francisco.<br />
<br />
Kevin: PC magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: PC Magazine, right. And, there was a guy named Tony Gold and there<br />
was somebody else that I can't remember. There was Tony Gold and<br />
this Mr. X started this magazine and they hired...David Banell will<br />
probably tell you all, I don't know all the details but I'm sure he<br />
has it engraved in his brain.<br />
They hired David Banell to run it and I guess several other people,<br />
and my understanding is, that they told them they were going to<br />
give them a piece of the action, they weren't going to pay them<br />
very much but you're all part owners and everything, but nobody<br />
ever wrote it down.<br />
<br />
So when Ziff Davis approached Tony Gold and Mr. X and wanted to buy<br />
the magazine, and the guys said, "Oh yeah, sure," and they sold it<br />
to him and all these people that were working for them said, "Well,<br />
what about us. We're part owners too." But there was no proof of<br />
it. So Ziff bought it, and they were right in the middle, just<br />
about to go to press with an issue and they got word that it had<br />
been purchased by Ziff.<br />
<br />
So David Banell took just about the entire staff and they walked<br />
out and went across town and started PC World. Apparently their<br />
lawyers said, "Don't take anything with you." So they just walked<br />
out and left the offices as they were, and Ziff, who now had a<br />
magazine to get out and no one to do it, sent me out to San<br />
Francisco for a couple of weeks and there was like an editorial<br />
assistant and a couple of freelance writers, were the only people<br />
left.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So this is when you became the interim.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is how I become the editorial director of PC. So I basically<br />
went out there and walked into this office and had to pull together<br />
their issue and get it off to the printer. They had a big dummy on<br />
the wall where everthing...<br />
<br />
Kevin: They lay all the...<br />
<br />
Betsy: They lay all the impositions where all the pages and the stories<br />
were going to go and they moved everything around. [laughs] But<br />
they couldn't resist.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That is awesome.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This one guy, whose name I wish I could remember. Barry Owen,<br />
worked with me, and we were able to get it off to the printer and<br />
then pack everything up and send it back to New York and then they<br />
hired Barry Owen, he moved to New York and he eventually become the<br />
editor, because that was who they had.<br />
I was sort of the editorial director for a while and they said<br />
that, "If you were going to do this, you would have to come to the<br />
city. We are going to really set up an office here and make it<br />
real." And I said, "No, I am not going to drive into the city every<br />
day or take the train or the bus or anything." It was a interesting<br />
story and we were getting much more interesting version of it from<br />
David Barnell, who was there. [laughs]<br />
<br />
And in the mean time, they were all starting up PC World and taking<br />
all of their freelancers and trying to make it as difficult as<br />
possible for PC. That was a big rivalry, obviously.<br />
<br />
David: And then it created a couple of months of problems at creative too,<br />
because my editor was gone. I had really gotten very dependent to<br />
rely on her for so many things. "I got to edit this myself." And<br />
then the whole question mark was, OK if PC magazine, is she can<br />
stay with it. It was a time of uncertainty.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm sure it was a bad career move.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. But PC magazine still exist.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, exactly. I don't know if I would have existed if I had to<br />
commute to New York, that's a nasty commute. Millions of people do<br />
it but, I just didn't want to be one of them. I didn't mean to<br />
interrupt, so back to you.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What are you most proud of, or everything you have done?<br />
<br />
David: OK, that's obviously not a one word answer. Proud is, I am not<br />
crazy about it. I guess the fact that I continued to hear from<br />
people that said, "Hey, I got my start in computing from Basic<br />
computer games or Creative Computing," or something that I had my<br />
hand in, that makes me feel pretty good.<br />
You have a long term, or longer term influence that just what you<br />
do at the time, it's living on. It's not living on forever. Basic<br />
isn't going to live on forever. But I think the idea that having<br />
some positive influence on other people, on their lives, on their<br />
careers, that's a good.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You helped send people into the computer science field.<br />
<br />
David: And you know the specific individual accomplishments. Yeah, I wrote<br />
a couple of programs that are probably in some cases, maybe not the<br />
program but the routines, are still in use. That's minor compared<br />
to having an influence on people and their career and their<br />
outlook, their future. That's way more important. "OK so I wrote a<br />
great algorithm, so what."<br />
<br />
Kevin: And you really think it's the same algorithm that's being used in<br />
Google maps and...<br />
<br />
David: Portions of it, yeah. But that is minor. I look back and I say,<br />
"Almost anything that I wrote in the last 30-40 years, if I were<br />
doing it today, I would have done it a little differently, but I<br />
didn't know then what I know now." So there's no one thing I could<br />
say, "Oh, that was a really great article, or great insight," or<br />
something. Anything can be improved upon.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sure. That's what disappoints me about computer magazines today is<br />
I don't think that it seems like children going to be able to go.<br />
It's not going to motivate anybody to do anything, other than use<br />
Word version 18 or whatever. There's no Basic programs to type<br />
anymore and it's not exciting.<br />
[cross talk]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Well, [inaudible 01:42:31] was mentioning that at breakfast,<br />
oh gosh that was just yesterday.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was yesterday [laughs] .<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] That kids today don't have any feeling about, or I should<br />
say knowledge about the real basics of bits. What is a bit?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: Nobody knows anymore. He wanted to find some little simple piece of<br />
hardware. Really, I guess he has, that every kid when they're in<br />
the 5th or 6th grade will be exposed to this so they'll have some<br />
concept of what bits are all about. Are you ever going to get that<br />
into schools today? No. So anyway, it's just kind of, hopefully<br />
there's been some long term influence.<br />
And what I'm doing now even, which is mainly developing bible<br />
studies for...well, I mostly have guys that have had a drug or<br />
alcohol addiction problem coming to this. They're in a rescue<br />
mission. I'm hoping that these studies can have a little bit of an<br />
influence on the direction of their lives. They're a positive<br />
influence on where they go from here. So it's kind of, people more<br />
than a specific thing or whatever.<br />
<br />
[pause]<br />
<br />
Those are terrible copies.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They are copies. These are from the scans. I was printing scans and<br />
I wasn't trying to make them pretty. Just for my reasons, it was<br />
quick and dirty. I could've bumped the contrast and stuff.<br />
<br />
David: There's Carl.<br />
[pause]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do have anything left, like how many subscribers you had over time?<br />
Is that data around anymore? How many newsstand copies you had? I<br />
assume that is a lot.<br />
<br />
David: OK, maximum, I think we mentioned that. We hit just about a half a<br />
million before Ziff killed it. Then, they gave people a choice of<br />
three magazines that they expected to continue to publish, PC,<br />
Apple's A+, or Mac User.<br />
I'm guessing that most people went with PC. One of the reasons<br />
actually was Ziff's rationale at that point was, PC World had<br />
really grown a lot and the circulation base of PC World and PC were<br />
very close. They were both about a half million. PC might have had<br />
a small lead.<br />
<br />
Then, by killing Creative Computing and rolling all of those<br />
subscribers, there was some overlap. Certainly, there were some<br />
subscribers that got both magazines. You probably had a quarter of<br />
a million additional subscribers into PC. All of the sudden, they<br />
go to advertise, "We've got three-quarters of a million and PC<br />
World only has half a million."<br />
<br />
That was when PC had a huge growth spurt. You know, they started<br />
publishing those telephone-book-thick issues.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I would think that it probably still holds the record for the<br />
largest magazine ever published, whenever the issue was that they<br />
published it, it was their biggest one. Certainly magazines aren't<br />
getting bigger now. They didn't continue to increase in size after<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: Then they started publishing it twice a month. The nudge that the<br />
subscriber base at Creative, gave to PC really, separated them<br />
completely from PC World. They had their reasons.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. This is a chart of the page count of Creative Computing over<br />
its life. It's not a question, I just made a chart. Every December<br />
there's a peak for the big December issue. Right at the end it<br />
just, all of the sudden, stopped.<br />
<br />
David: Well, that's when Ziff had decided to kill it, which was almost a<br />
year before. They basically let us publish for another eight or<br />
nine months after they had made the decision.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was a lot of back and forth. Are they going to kill it? Are<br />
they not going to kill it?<br />
<br />
David: They weren't promoting, no subscription promotion. They were saving<br />
their money. If you don't promote the subscriptions, you're not<br />
going to get them.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is page count.<br />
<br />
David: It was advertising.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:48:59]<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't actually subscriber base didn't drop them. That's cool.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just thought I'd do a comparison, even though that's not really<br />
what I'm doing here. In the beginning, you guys were bimonthly and<br />
they were monthly. I couldn't know how to do it accurately. Their<br />
page count's actually higher, because they were doing twice as<br />
much. I don't have all the data here. You guys tended to publish<br />
larger issues than "Kilobyte?"<br />
<br />
David: It was so dependent upon advertising. You got some magazines, they<br />
would run 80, 90 percent advertising, if they could. In some<br />
special interest fields, you can get away with that, because people<br />
are actually buying the magazine for the advertising, not for the<br />
editorial content.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [inaudible 01:50:02] , a good example.<br />
<br />
David: That's exactly right. Even what the guys that bought Military<br />
Vehicles, they just went over so heavily to...I always believe that<br />
you should have at least one-third editorial content, preferably<br />
more. They dropped down to 20 percent to edit.<br />
<br />
Kevin: There was one issue, the 10th anniversary issue, I don't mean to be<br />
picking on Wayne here. There was this quote he happened to say,<br />
which I thought was really interesting to me, I wanted to get your<br />
take on it. He said, this is in 1984, "A computer system doesn't<br />
really stand a prayer anymore unless there's at least one<br />
dedicated, independent magazine for its users."<br />
<br />
David: Wayne said that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wayne said that. Is that true? At the time, would you have agreed<br />
with that?<br />
<br />
David: In '84? Again, you've got to look at where we were in the cycle at<br />
that point. The cycle was then, there were more computers dying off<br />
than there were new ones being released. Standardization had come<br />
in really. You've got the IBM PC, and everybody's producing a PC<br />
clone. Apple kept going, and Atari, and Commodore attempted to.<br />
If you were to start a computer company at that point, with a new<br />
computer, yeah, you'd need something to give your user base<br />
something to do with it, more than just what the manufacturer was<br />
selling. So, that's probably accurate. What do you think?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, I think it's accurate. That's what people started to expect.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. Another chord of the same issue which we've kind of touched<br />
on from Tom Dwyer. This is in 1984. He's saying, "Computer<br />
magazines used to have personality [laughter] and now they don't."<br />
Now, they really don't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They really don't!<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think they still have personality in form but now it's just<br />
inconsistent.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Who was Tom Dwyer? I don't remember him.<br />
<br />
David: Tom Dwyer? He was at University of Pittsburgh. He came up with all<br />
those neat applications. He and Margo...He had the best basic<br />
primer of anybody, in fact the only one that both Kemeny and Kurtz<br />
endorsed outside of their own material. He had really written some<br />
good Basic books.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm just finishing up here. The Internet says you were born in<br />
1939. Is that right?<br />
<br />
David: Yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Where were you born?<br />
<br />
David: New York, New York.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent.<br />
<br />
David: I was born in the hospital that my father had a hand in designing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Really?<br />
<br />
David: He was an architect up until the Recession. I think he, perhaps,<br />
designed the restrooms but he wasn't the...<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: When were you two married?<br />
<br />
Betsy: 1988. 25 years ago.<br />
<br />
David: June 18, 1988.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What's your last name now?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mine?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ahl.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I tried keeping this professional thing and it was just way too<br />
confusing, since that really wasn't my name anyway. That was my<br />
first husband's name, and then just...this is way too complicated.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My wife kept her maiden name and now she wishes she hadn't. It's<br />
just confusing. It just made sense to do.<br />
<br />
Betsy: If had been my maiden name, I might have, but it really wasn't.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What haven't I asked you that I should have?<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] We kind of were noodling it around last night and said,<br />
"Man, the guy's thorough."<br />
<br />
Betsy: You the most prepared interviewer ever.<br />
<br />
David: I jotted down a couple of notes. Nope.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Got everything?<br />
<br />
David: What's your thinking? Because originally you were talking to me<br />
about covering Wayne's magazines and so on.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My original thought, when I had put no thought into it, was that it<br />
would be half about Wayne's magazine and half about Creative. First<br />
of all, after talking to him, I thought there's not enough to do<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: Did you talk to Wayne?<br />
<br />
Kevin: I talked to Wayne.<br />
<br />
David: Well that's good to know, right? Carl Helmers didn't know if Wayne<br />
was still alive.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He's still alive.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's true. We asked Carl Helmers if Wayne was still alive and he<br />
was [inaudible 01:56:06] .<br />
<br />
David: Actually, there was another guy up there that published a computer<br />
magazine. What the heck was the name of it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Who are you talking about?<br />
<br />
David: Up in New Hampshire, Peterborough. It was one of the earlier would-<br />
be competitors to Datamation. So, it was much earlier.<br />
He was absolutely totally convinced about the Kennedy assassination<br />
and published a computer analysis of all the photos and everything<br />
else. Every single issue of the magazine had this stuff. He and<br />
Wayne were on the same wavelength on that. You ask Wayne about the<br />
conspiracy. [laughs] You'll get an earful.<br />
<br />
Kevin: In answer to your question. First, it was going to be the two, and<br />
then that happened. Also my wife said, "If you're doing two, then<br />
it's going to seem like a compare and contrast thing." That's not<br />
what I want to do.<br />
Now I'm thinking that this will be a project about the earliest<br />
computer magazines, the first computer magazines. That way, I can,<br />
whatever, four or five chapters. One on Creative, and maybe Byte.<br />
I'm meeting with the editor of Byte in a couple of weeks at an<br />
event, maybe Interface Age or one of the other ones.<br />
<br />
David: If you can find Bob Jones, that would be an interesting contrast.<br />
He was Interface Age. He had a different perspective on a lot of<br />
things, and I had a lot of respect for him. He just didn't sell at<br />
the right time. Too bad. Bob Jones was a very serious, good guy.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Who were the other early people? Dr. Dobbs? I don't know what...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, Dr. Dobbs...<br />
<br />
David: Jim Warren! Oh my goodness. That would give you another perspective<br />
altogether.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's, again, the California...<br />
<br />
David: Jim Warren and Bob Albrecht are tied together very closely. They're<br />
both in sort of in the alternative lifestyle. I don't know what<br />
you'd call it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That probably had Friday afternoon pot parties. [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Oh, boy. Did they ever! Yes, yes. Jim also was the one that started<br />
the West Coast computer fairs. He's a very capable guy. Dr. Dobb's<br />
journal was in a sense, well, you've probably seen it. You have,<br />
right? OK, so you know.<br />
That's really low level programming rather than higher languages.<br />
We're talking about machine languages, assembly language,<br />
programming, and there. It was sort of like Microsystems was to<br />
Byte. Microsystems, for the really serious hardware guy. Dr. Dobbs<br />
was for the really serious programmer, compared to Creative which<br />
was for people who just wanted to type something in that would<br />
work.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:59:35] basic right. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Dr. Dobbs. That was a totally different [inaudible 01:59:43]<br />
competitor.<br />
<br />
David: We didn't compete at all. I had a view that we competed at all with<br />
them; they may have thought we did but I didn't think so.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did they even have advertising?<br />
<br />
David: Oh yeah, actually they did, and it kept going for a long time<br />
because it was a small little nitch magazine. But, yeah, Jim Warren<br />
would be an interesting guy, very interesting guy early on. I don't<br />
know about Albert because you say he published more tabloid<br />
newspapers. I don't know if they ever really published any magazine<br />
size thing or not. Probably not, but it would give me a totally<br />
different perspective because they are coming from the west coast,<br />
looser or whatever.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That sounded pretty loose.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah nothing compared to that.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think he was sort of in rebellion when he started working at<br />
Creative Computing because he was coming off of AT&T where he had to<br />
wear a suit to work every day. So the first thing he did was burn<br />
his suits and wear t-shirt and jeans way before anybody was doing<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: I went extremely in the other direction, yeah I did, but who else<br />
real early. Personal computing which I think David Barnell somehow<br />
involved in it at some point in there. Because they moved from the<br />
west coast to New Jersey, they were bought by...who was that? It<br />
was mostly a company that published things like hardware age and<br />
advertiser-driven magazines. What was the name?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, gosh. Begins with an 'H'.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Halshep<br />
<br />
David: No. Anyway, when they brought personal computing...I think Barnell<br />
maybe even started it, and then they moved it to New Jersey, and<br />
then David said "I'm not going to New Jersey. I'm a west coast<br />
guy," or whatever. And then, they changed the whole thing totally.<br />
That's why I said they're one of the ones where they were so<br />
totally advertiser driven. A press release is a product review, as<br />
far as they were concerned.<br />
They had some interesting stuff. They were a competitor only in<br />
name, but also because they got the advertising. "I think I'm going<br />
to advertise." "Oh! We're going to publish a wonderful review! Give<br />
it to us." And so they were early, and they made money. There were<br />
a bunch of flash-in-the-pan magazines that lasted 2 or 3 or maybe 6<br />
issues, but nobody...<br />
<br />
Kevin: But only one in seven made it, so...<br />
<br />
Betsy: One in seven, right?<br />
<br />
David: That's right, exactly. I can't remember the name of some of these<br />
ones, but there was a very successful big magazine that published<br />
all Apple...reviews of Apple stuff. What was that one? Apple by<br />
themselves spawned I'd guess half a dozen magazines.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Inquest, and Insider, and Apple...a bunch of others there.<br />
<br />
David: Right. Actually, there's one that I can't think of the name of, it<br />
turned out, it was bigger and thicker and creative. They were<br />
publishing a lot of stuff, but again, it would all be positive and<br />
so they really killed us on getting advertising. We had been a<br />
publisher of Apple material for a while. Then all these others came<br />
along. That one, whatever it was, was really took a lot of<br />
advertising from us. I'll think about it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You'll remember.<br />
<br />
David: I'll remember some of this. When it all settled out, you came back<br />
down to eight or nine, but the ones we're talking about...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Well, at one point there was 200.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I think that's correct.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You are probably counting newsletters..<br />
<br />
Kevin: Probably industry-specific stuff and niche stuff but still, you<br />
went from one to 200, 10 years ago.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. That's true.</div>Mauryhttps://www.computingpioneers.com/index.php?title=Dave_Ahl_and_Betsy_Ahl&diff=144Dave Ahl and Betsy Ahl2019-09-25T18:25:48Z<p>Maury: sp</p>
<hr />
<div>This is a transcript of an audio interview. This transcript may contain errors - if you're using this material for research, etc. please verify with the original recorded interview.<br />
<br />
Source: ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast<br />
<br />
Source URL: http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-280-david-and-betsy-ahl-creative-computing-magazine<br />
<br />
Interviewer: Kevin Savetz<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm interested in how you guys got together. Was it some sort of<br />
office romance? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It started before then. I was working at Drew University and I was<br />
dating the computer science professor. He invited Dave...he was a<br />
subscriber to Creative Computing. I can remember being at his house<br />
and picking up a copy of this magazine and thinking, "Creative<br />
Computing," and laughing. "What kind of a title is that?"<br />
He invited Dave to come speak to one of his classes. While he was<br />
there, he said, "I should stop by your placement office. We're<br />
starting to expand. I'm looking for some people." Right? Am I<br />
getting this right? I was looking for other opportunities, so I<br />
sent him my resume. Many months later, he hired me.<br />
<br />
David: She still smarts about that.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: I interviewed her in, I don't know, April or so.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You interviewed me on April 17th and you did not hire me until<br />
August 1st. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: A lot was going on that year. That was '78.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was a really long time after that that we got married. We didn't<br />
get married until 10 years later.<br />
<br />
David: Actually, I had hired Betsy as our business manager. That's what I<br />
really needed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Not a wife, then.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not wife then, either.<br />
<br />
David: Not at that point. We had 2 buildings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had one.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, well I was looking for...<br />
<br />
Betsy: My first job was to find another building.<br />
<br />
David: We were expanding like crazy. In fact, one of the reasons that I<br />
didn't hire her sooner, I had just left my day job at AT&T, and was<br />
facing up to, "Oh my gosh, can I afford to take a salary out of<br />
Creative Computing?" Yes, we had expanded a lot, but can I even pay<br />
myself, much less other senior people? I left AT&T in July, and<br />
finally by August it became clear I really have to get this<br />
administration end of things under control.<br />
The editorial was OK. I had enough outside contributors that were<br />
going along with what we were doing in-house that I could continue<br />
with that, but it was the other end of things where we really had<br />
some problems. So then we go to 2 separate facilities. One was a 2<br />
family house on the other side of Morristown, and the other was a<br />
converted greenhouse garage, which is where I started. So, Betsy<br />
was in the greenhouse garage where I had the administration side of<br />
things, and I was at the house and that was the editorial and art<br />
and...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Software.<br />
<br />
David: ...putting the magazine together. Software, right. So she would<br />
come over from her place to my office every day or two just to let<br />
me know what's going on, and we'd get together. But it wasn't until<br />
I don't' remember the date when Betsy was saying, "Well, I'd like<br />
to get into..."<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well I had spent all my summers in college and two thereafter<br />
working at our local newspaper, writing editing and putting the<br />
whole thing together, so I think I more or less just said, "We've<br />
got all these new product announcements that we don't have anybody<br />
to do, why don't I just do them?" So, I started out doing the press<br />
releases and things.<br />
<br />
David: Her newspaper experience was first in high school covering sports.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, I started out covering the unpopular sports as a senior in<br />
high school. Because they didn't want a girl to write about the<br />
important sports. So they let the girl write about the unimportant<br />
sports, which turned out to be the winning sports, at this small<br />
New Jersey high school. That's how I started.<br />
<br />
David: And then at the newspaper, you started by writing obituaries,<br />
right?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well, it's one of the things I did. I always wanted to be a Spanish<br />
teacher. I didn't know anything about this. So, I got this sports-<br />
writing job by way of a babysitting job, I babysat for the<br />
publisher's kids and on the way home one night he said to me, "We<br />
always have a boy from the school who writes about the sports for<br />
the paper, do you know anybody?" and I said, "Well, I know the guy<br />
who did it last year, and if he could do it, I could do it."<br />
So I did that and didn't' think much more of it. Went off to<br />
college, came back over spring break, and ran into the guy in the<br />
grocery store and he said, "Would you like a job working for the<br />
paper this summer?" And I said sure. I had no idea whether he<br />
wanted me to sweep the floors or what, but it was a job so I took<br />
it. It was in the editorial department.<br />
<br />
And I learned from some very serious journalists who had worked for<br />
a very good paper, the Newark Evening News, which was a very<br />
serious paper that probably was too serious and folded, probably in<br />
the mid '60s, but these people were really good journalists and<br />
they taught me a lot.<br />
<br />
I think it was that first year, about halfway through the summer<br />
the publisher was on vacation, the editor was going to go on<br />
vacation when the publisher came back and the publisher, the day he<br />
was supposed to come back had appendicitis, had to have an<br />
appendectomy which back in those days was a much bigger deal than<br />
it is now. The editor said, "Well, I'm leaving." [laughs] And there<br />
I was. I was running this little paper.<br />
<br />
David: So I figured if you can run a newspaper, even though it's just a<br />
summer job, she could do a lot for us. Well, Betsy continued to<br />
handle the administrative things for really quite awhile and, as<br />
she said, probably was initially doing new product releases. Cause<br />
you get just tons of it over the transom and from these smaller<br />
companies...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So you'd like get a press release and then you'd rewrite it, that<br />
sort of things?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well we had a new product section and it was a format, a style for<br />
them, for each one. If they sent a photo, do a photo, a cut line<br />
for it. Basically what I do is let them pile up and then sort<br />
through and figure out which ones were worthy of attention. And<br />
then it was kind of just filler. They ran in one column and when<br />
you came to the end of the magazine whatever you had leftover you<br />
would fill in with these.<br />
<br />
David: And the thing is that the companies that were putting out these<br />
press releases, this was back in the, what '76, '77 or so, tiny<br />
little companies. They had no marketing expertise so they were<br />
sending us, in some cases, not quite handwritten but pretty crude.<br />
So it took some editing and some real work to make them readable.<br />
And then, as Betsy said, you had to guess. OK, which one, this is a<br />
significant product but is this guy going to be able to make this<br />
company go or is it just going to flop? And we tried to be<br />
responsible to the readers. Reporting on things that weren't just a<br />
wonderful great new idea but something that they were going to have<br />
on the market that was going to get some support and everything<br />
else. So anyway. That was a long story of how we got together.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I still don't know how you got together.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We were working in an office about as large as this banquette here<br />
together. Because when we first started working together we didn't<br />
have this other house. So it was the two of us. You had an actual<br />
desk I believe. I had a table that he had made out of particle<br />
board. Yeah it was fancy and I had to put duct tape along it<br />
because the edge was making holes in my clothes.<br />
So we worked in this office back to back, sort of got to know each<br />
other, and became friends, little by little. He said to me, when<br />
you're looking for this building, it would be a good thing if there<br />
was a place for me to live because I'm in the process of getting<br />
separated from my wife. Which it turned out you didn't do right<br />
away but eventually you did. Right?<br />
<br />
David: Well, it was three months later. That was right away in a sense.<br />
What precipitated that was we had a woman that was working in the<br />
mailroom and she got in cahoots with somebody in the accounting<br />
department and they started working a little embezzlement.<br />
<br />
Kevin: This was at the [inaudible 00:13:49] ?<br />
<br />
David: Pardon?<br />
<br />
Betsy: At Creative Computing.<br />
<br />
David: No, at Creative Computing. This was just after Betsy was hired. In<br />
fact, they had it going on before and I mean they were very good at<br />
it. What they did is they set up a bank account in the name of<br />
Creative Computing in the next county. And they would take very<br />
fourth or fifth check and it might be a subscription, it might be<br />
paying for an ad or something...<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was mostly the advertisers.<br />
<br />
David: Well it was both. And then they put that into their bank account.<br />
And then the one that was in the accounting department would mark<br />
the thing as paid.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, she didn't. That was her mistake.<br />
<br />
David: Well, she didn't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because that wasn't her job.<br />
<br />
David: Well she blew one. In any event it was my advertising manager that<br />
we had sent an overdue notice to one of the advertisers.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Apple.<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Apple. It was Regis McKenna, it was Apple's agency.<br />
<br />
David: And they said, we paid that. And a woman said, well send me proof.<br />
And they did. And we looked at the bank where it was deposited and<br />
then we called in local detective, police department. And they got<br />
the bank records and said, "How much do you think this was?" Well<br />
no they didn't say that, they said, this is probably a lot more<br />
than you thought.<br />
And it turned out to be well over $100,000. And our total annual,<br />
not even profit at that point...well, the gross was just about a<br />
million at that point, not quite, but close to it. So $100,000 was<br />
a big, big chunk 10 percent.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When was this?<br />
<br />
David: '78. And, so, obviously we fired these two. And then the court<br />
finally, they determined that they had also, one of them had been<br />
involved in welfare fraud and other stuff and the court ordered<br />
them to pay it back at the rate of, I don't know...<br />
<br />
Betsy: 47 cents a week.<br />
<br />
David: It was some tiny amount.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 00:16:26]<br />
[laughter and crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Course they'll never pay anything.<br />
<br />
David: And we got one payment you know, and that was it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And she was ordered to do public service. Like who wants someone<br />
doing public service for them who's done something like that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Magazines back then, probably any business but, they were a hotbed<br />
of intrigue. You had that happened and then the whole Bike Magazine<br />
getting stolen.<br />
<br />
David: So Betsy actually, in response to that brought, in response to the<br />
embezzlement brought in her Sister-in-Law Bobbi, and I think your<br />
mother too...<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Bobbi's mother.<br />
<br />
David: Bobbi's mother, OK. But one to...<br />
<br />
Betsy: My mother in law. I was a widow at the time.<br />
<br />
David: ...do some of the accounting because we didn't have an accountant<br />
and wanted just to help out and make some calls to advertisers and<br />
say can you speed up your payment a little bit and also calls to<br />
people that we owed money to, hey we're going to be maybe a little<br />
late. It really didn't look good. That was just a huge amount of<br />
money and so we had to stretch things out and hope that the growth<br />
continued so we could recover some of this.<br />
Betsy really rescued us there. It was amazing. We finally did<br />
stretch things out. What precipitated the separation with my wife<br />
at the time is I went home and told her this had happened and<br />
everything.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Thanksgiving weekend. Day before Thanksgiving.<br />
<br />
David: The day before Thanksgiving is when we got all the information from<br />
the police department and I went home to my wife and she said, "You<br />
dumb...," well I won't repeat the whole thing but, "You are so<br />
stupid. You trust people." "Yes, I trust people." "You shouldn't<br />
trust people like that. Get out of the house. I can't put up with<br />
this anymore." So it was a good thing we had a two family house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had this two family house.<br />
<br />
David: I moved into the bedroom on one side.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He had his office on one side of the top floor in the back bedroom<br />
and his bedroom in the back bedroom on the other side and his<br />
kitchen. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is this the place I was reading about where your bedroom was above<br />
the kitchen?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yes. The Ted Nelson.<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, a lot of things precipitated. Because of that, we had to<br />
make some other changes on personnel and move some people around. I<br />
think after that then Betsy took more of a role in the editorial<br />
end of things.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Stayed there until the bitter end.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The bitter end. Actually, I was there after he was gone.<br />
<br />
David: That's true.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ziff continued to pay me several months after they closed the<br />
magazine to stay behind and clean up because we have a 75,000<br />
square foot building. Make sure that we don't dispose of the<br />
hardware and just basically get it ready.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When you quit at the phone company to start a magazine, that must<br />
have been scary.<br />
<br />
David: I had left Digital Equipment in 1974, and I'm sure you read the<br />
whole rationale behind that, and joined AT&T in marketing,<br />
educational marketing. Same thing I was doing at DEC but obviously<br />
marketing different products to a different mix of customers. AT&T,<br />
back then and perhaps today, they had a real formula that you're in<br />
a job for two years and then they rotate you out or they put you in<br />
another job.<br />
The way AT&T works is they have certain steps. There's a manager<br />
and then a director level. There are levels, one, two, three, four,<br />
five. The operating companies, like Pacific Bell and so on, have<br />
similar steps that are considered a half step below AT&T. What they<br />
do is they rotate you out to an operating company, a half step<br />
promotion, they rotate you back into AT&T, now you're a full step.<br />
You never get a full step in one company.<br />
<br />
They had offered me a rotation to Southern Bell. Birmingham,<br />
Alabama. "No. No." Then probably two or three months later said<br />
we've got an opening in Wisconsin Tel. "Oh my gosh. Come on,<br />
something sensible." I turned them down, which was bad. You can't<br />
turn down. If you turn down three you might as well retire.<br />
<br />
The third one was, in a sense, it wasn't a promotion but it was a<br />
sideways job jump within AT&T itself. I went from having the<br />
education group, which was about eight people, to corporate<br />
communications, which is about 100 people and a huge budget. I was<br />
responsible for all of the marketing communications for the whole<br />
Bell system. Not advertising.<br />
<br />
We had seminar centers, put out all kinds of educational pamphlets,<br />
even a magazine for our customers on how to use the equipment. I<br />
was doing that. It's a big job. It's a 50 hour a week job. Creative<br />
Computing was halfway down the block. I'd go there at lunch time,<br />
see how things were doing.<br />
<br />
As I said a little bit ago, when it looked like we were going to<br />
hit a million dollars I said I've got to get serious about this.<br />
That's when I resigned from AT&T. That was probably the first, I<br />
shouldn't say the first, but that was a major problem with my wife<br />
at that time. You're leaving AT&T? You're leaving all those<br />
benefits? What are you doing, you idiot? We were on the downward<br />
spiral at that point and then the embezzlement just sealed the<br />
whole thing.<br />
<br />
Leaving any job for an unknown thing like you started a little<br />
company and you leave your day job. You're making a real<br />
commitment.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Even once you were at Creative full time, it looks like you did a<br />
lot of everything. You were writing, you were doing programming,<br />
you were being the editor, the publisher and the editor which is<br />
not done anymore.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. I don't know. You can correct me. I don't think I was a<br />
control freak.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. You had Phil Ellenberg. You had just hired Phil Ellenberg as<br />
the advertising manager. Richie was doing it. Where did he come<br />
from? He came from some respectable place. He came from some<br />
respectable place, Phil Ellenberg.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, he did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was like a real person who had a real job, not like the rest of<br />
us. He was the ad manager. I think once you made the step to leave<br />
AT&T then you mostly concentrated on the editorial. You weren't<br />
selling ads and writing and you had Steve North who was doing a lot<br />
of the editorial.<br />
<br />
David: At the beginning, yeah. The thing is I'd be lying if I said I knew<br />
how things were going to go, I knew this was going to be a huge<br />
magazine some day. I had no clue. When I started Creative Computing<br />
there weren't even personal computers at that point. I was<br />
convinced, I guess, that they would come about. I had no idea that<br />
it would be three months later that the Altair came about. It was<br />
more that I thought that an educational magazine like we had been<br />
publishing at DEC should continue.<br />
DEC had dropped off. They stopped publishing Edu when I left the<br />
education group. Well, they published an issue or two but they<br />
really weren't serious about continuing it. Then you had all of<br />
these people out here in the west coast, the Hewlett Packard<br />
computers. They were publishing some good software, they had some<br />
good arrangements with Minnesota Educational Computers Consortium<br />
and some others to distribute stuff that they developed, but there<br />
was no information source for schools and teachers and kids that<br />
were using computers.<br />
<br />
That's what I envisioned initially, but then once the Altair and<br />
the others came out people buy this kit computer and say what can I<br />
do with it? We've got these programs that will run.<br />
<br />
Betsy: First you have to steal Basic.<br />
<br />
David: What?<br />
<br />
Betsy: First you have to steal Basic.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I noticed that, I don't know what it's called, the public opinion<br />
or I don't know the word, this part here. The number one magazine<br />
of computer applications.<br />
<br />
David: That was a Davis thing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It started off first issue a non-profit magazine of educational and<br />
recreational. That was November 1970. May/June 1975 the words non-<br />
profit disappeared.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He never set it up as a non-profit.<br />
<br />
David: I did not.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You started making a profit.<br />
<br />
David: That's right. [laughs]<br />
Betsy; It was the unintentionally non-profit.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Three years later it quietly changed into the number one magazine<br />
of computer applications and software.<br />
<br />
David: That was when Ziff Davis took over.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Really? No, that was '78.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, that was '78.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, '78.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He stayed until the end.<br />
<br />
David: Right. OK. You're right. Who knows. We changed it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It seemed like a good idea at the time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's clearly a shift from education to education plus other things.<br />
<br />
David: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think it was when he realized that if you really wanted to make a<br />
profit you had to leave education behind because teachers want<br />
everything for free, or they certainly did then.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They have some websites for teachers. They still do. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Schools, teachers, yeah, they want everything for free and they get<br />
a lot for free. Places like Huntington Computer Project. There was<br />
one out here, Oregon. Yes, there was. I think it was based right<br />
here in Portland. It would have been, right, if it was in Oregon?<br />
Yes, there was a computing consortium at that time, Hewlett Packard<br />
oriented.<br />
Then you had People's Computer Company down in California that was<br />
sort of providing stuff to schools. They were mostly into<br />
alternative schools and there were a lot of them in the Bay area at<br />
that time. In fact, there was a magazine or a newspaper, big thing,<br />
I don't know how often it came out, called the "De-school Primer".<br />
<br />
It was for people that...I won't say they were hippies but<br />
basically homeschoolers but they got together and said, "We're<br />
going to educate our kids outside of the public education system<br />
but we don't want to do it individually. We'll get together." There<br />
was a big movement there and they were into computers, unlike the<br />
public schools back in '75, '76.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Homeschooling back then was very avant-garde. It was not approved.<br />
<br />
David: Not like today. The shift away from education. That, of course, was<br />
partially driven by the hardware that was then available to people<br />
at home.<br />
When I first started the magazine, I had four editors over the<br />
years, five I guess, but Steve Gray had been publishing a<br />
newsletter, what he called the "Amateur Computer Group Newsletter".<br />
It was for engineers who were scavenging up old parts from<br />
Honeywell and IBM and GE and DEC and trying to put together a<br />
computer. You've got success stories and here's how you can make<br />
this worth together.<br />
<br />
That was a long way away from an Altair, but that's what I was<br />
focusing on, people that were doing that and education. Changed our<br />
focus. You're right. Good observation.<br />
<br />
Kevin: After that, do you feel the focus changed in the next 10 years?<br />
<br />
David: The focus changed largely due to selling the magazine to Ziff<br />
Davis.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When's that?<br />
<br />
David: We were negotiating for a while and I think the sale finally went<br />
through in '83. Yeah, '83. Maybe late '82 but roughly then. They<br />
felt that you need more of a business focus, small business and<br />
people running businesses out of their home. That's where it<br />
started but then we got into real small businesses. I shouldn't say<br />
real but a store front or a small manufacturer, something like<br />
that. That's probably a direction we would not have gone. I<br />
wouldn't have gone on my own.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had a magazine called "Small Business Computing." Remember?<br />
<br />
David: That's right, we did. I would have kept Creative more targeted on<br />
the home market and still education, to some extent, but more on<br />
the home and people that were running a business, a single<br />
entrepreneur. You could review a spreadsheet or a small business<br />
computer or higher end printer or something but not lift it up to<br />
that next level up.<br />
When you're owned by somebody else and they say this is what we<br />
want to do you've got to be responsive to it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Why did you sell? Was it something that had to be done? I've read<br />
the official line.<br />
<br />
David: I think the official line is pretty close to the real line. What<br />
happened is the first magazine, maybe not the very first but the<br />
first sizable magazine, to sell was the Byte and they sold to<br />
McGraw Hill. Then there were three or four other sales. At the time<br />
there were maybe eight special interest publishers in the country.<br />
You had Hurst and CBS magazine and Ziff Davis. Maybe eight serious<br />
ones. There were some others that were, "Oh, it'd be nice if we<br />
could get into it."<br />
What happened is all of us at that point were spending maybe<br />
$100,000, $150,000 on circulation promotion. McGraw Hill says we<br />
want to get out there, we're going to spend a million dollars.<br />
They're mailing 10 times as much as we are. They're going to trade<br />
shows with big, elaborate booths and handing out all kinds of...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Free magazines.<br />
<br />
David: Not only free magazines but other stuff. That was half of it. The<br />
other half, which was probably more than half, was the advertising<br />
sales. We were using reps. We had different reps in different parts<br />
of the country, paying the rep commission on the advertising. When<br />
you are a McGraw Hill or a Hurst or a Ziff Davis you've got an in-<br />
house staff. They would have a reception at one of the computer<br />
conferences, a big deal.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We used to have a hospitality suite at the hotels in some of these<br />
conferences and then we would bring little hunks of cheese that we<br />
cut up from home and sneak the bottles of wine up the back stairway<br />
and they were having these big things with the giant balls of<br />
shrimp.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. It was just an order of magnitude different than what we<br />
could do. What happened, really, was that it got to the point where<br />
there were only three, really two, serious bidders that were still<br />
looking for a magazine and there are still about four magazines,<br />
four decent quality magazines, on the market and one was Compute,<br />
one was Interface Age. Personal Computing had just sold, there was<br />
us, and I forget who the fourth one was. There was four.<br />
<br />
Kevin: There were more magazines than buyers at this point.<br />
<br />
David: That's right. There were a lot more magazines, too, but there were<br />
four major players. One of the buyers, I didn't really regard them<br />
as serious, and that was Atari. I think they wanted to back into<br />
the thing. The two buyers left were CBS, and they had a magazine<br />
division at that time, and Ziff Davis and that was it. I said,<br />
"Man, I've got to make a deal here." That's what happened.<br />
I look back with hindsight. I said the guy, Robert I forget his<br />
last name, that owned Compute magazine, he held out. He held out<br />
until the end and he said, "I'm better than Interface Age," and he<br />
was and whatever the other one was, Family Computing, "I'm better<br />
than them." He got a really nice payoff from CBS because it was the<br />
last one and they wanted him. I don't know. If I had held off a<br />
little more would I have gotten more? Probably.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How much did you get?<br />
<br />
David: Can we publish this figure?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't know. I don't think we ever have.<br />
<br />
David: No, we never have.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's my chance for a scoop.<br />
<br />
David: Pardon?<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's my chance for a scoop.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] I'd rather not say. I can tell you Compute, if you ever<br />
read that number, which you will, it was seven times that much. It<br />
was huge. Huge. At that point, I think CBS just said we've got to<br />
get into this. We've really got to do something. The big loser was<br />
Bob Jones at Interface Age. He had a good magazine. That was a<br />
good, solid magazine. Bob Jones, he went to shows, he was always in<br />
a suit and tie. He would have fit into the corporate environment<br />
very well but he held out too long. I think he was holding out for<br />
even more.<br />
That's what I was afraid of. Less than a year later he was out of<br />
business. There was no way you could compete with these big guys.<br />
Ziff instantly started having these receptions at PC expos.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They had ad reps all over the country.<br />
<br />
David: Ad reps, yeah. Oh my gosh. We would not have survived.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Again, you [inaudible 00:41:03] .<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Not exactly right but yes. Wasn't bad. Wasn't bad.<br />
<br />
Kevin: But Ziff didn't have it for very long before they let it go. It was<br />
only a couple of years.<br />
<br />
David: It was almost four years. Three and a half years. They did a study,<br />
and this is one of the classics. I've been making a presentation at<br />
Leslie Park last year on the 10 biggest blunders in personal<br />
computing, and actually it's up to 12 now. One was, and I still<br />
feel that it was huge, is that Ziff Davis analyzed that market in<br />
'85 and determined that the home market, the market for home<br />
computers, had reached saturation. Five percent of the homes have a<br />
computer. That's it.<br />
There were three things, three major conclusions from their survey.<br />
I think probably one and a half of them were pretty good and one<br />
and a half were just absolutely wrong. The home market reaching<br />
saturation, wrong. The second one was that they said that the<br />
magazines that would be successful would be those that were focused<br />
on specific brands of computers. Are you getting all that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: With the IBM PC it really brought standardization to the industry.<br />
Their analysis was that Apple and PC were going to be the dominant<br />
players in the future and in that they were right. They said we've<br />
got to have a magazine that's just focused on those two and they<br />
did. What was their Apple magazine? They had two Apple magazines.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A+.<br />
<br />
David: But they also had the one for the Mac.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mac User.<br />
<br />
David: They had two Apple magazines and then PC. PC they spun off a whole<br />
bunch. PC Week.<br />
<br />
Betsy: PC Junior.<br />
<br />
David: A bunch of them. In any event, they were right in that. The other<br />
one that they were semi-right, in the long term future they were<br />
totally wrong but in the short term future they were probably<br />
right, and that they looked at...We had been covering bulletin<br />
board systems. CompuServe, whatever its predecessor was, basically<br />
online type of stuff.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Genie.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. They said that's just a flash in a pan, online stuff. Well, in<br />
'85 it was. It took a while. It took another 8 to 10 years for that<br />
but then oh my God. You know what's happened today. If they had<br />
stuck with Creative Computing and rather than trying to make it a<br />
small business focused magazine but kept the home and the online<br />
focus we would have owned the Internet market today, absolutely<br />
owned it. It would have been a bigger magazine than all the others<br />
put together. Hindsight is 20/20.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I know it wasn't your choice but do you have regret about that?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: At the time it was devastating.<br />
<br />
David: Absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was like someone killing your child.<br />
<br />
David: At the time, we sat in these meetings up in Stanford, Connecticut,<br />
of all places. The reason for that is Bill Ziff. What happened in<br />
the interim a year or two after they purchased Creative Computing<br />
and PC, Bill Ziff came down with cancer really big time and was<br />
afraid of dying next year. So he was moving all of his resources<br />
and the holdings outside of New York to avoid really major<br />
taxation. I'm not sure that Connecticut was much better but he was<br />
splitting them between Connecticut and Florida. Anyway, we wound up<br />
having a bunch of meetings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was trying to maintain residence in Connecticut.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I guess that was it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was living in the Crown Plaza.<br />
<br />
David: I remember the last one. We were up at the hotel.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Crown Plaza. It was Stanford, it wasn't Harvard.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, Stanford.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I said Harvard.<br />
<br />
David: When they finally came and said we're going to shut this down. That<br />
was a devastating time. We probably could have continued to work<br />
for Ziff if we had been willing to go into New York but when you<br />
get used to working a mile or two from where you live the idea of<br />
commuting into New York, who knows what the job would have been.<br />
Bye. That was it. That was, in retrospect, a mistake.<br />
The other thing that happened as a result of Bill Ziff having this<br />
bout with cancer is that Ziff Davis sold off all of their other<br />
special interest magazines. Popular Boating, Popular Photography.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yachting, Modern Bride.<br />
<br />
David: They had a big group of travel magazines. Actually, one of the<br />
things they did after Creative Computing was to shut down...we got<br />
friendly with the publisher and some of the people in the traveling<br />
division and we started doing some freelance travel writing.<br />
I was writing a monthly column for one of the travel magazines that<br />
went to travel agents on automating your travel office and so on,<br />
which was an interesting thing because there's a small business<br />
that really depended upon computers with the reservation systems<br />
and all the airlines had a different reservation system. You had to<br />
have Saber.<br />
<br />
A lot of them would go with one and make an agreement with somebody<br />
else to make their other reservations. In any event, it was a bad<br />
system and I was writing a column on how to make this work for you.<br />
As you know, I don't know how many months later we got into the<br />
Atari camp.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was your next gig?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. It was Joe Sugarman, remember, that hooked us up with Atari.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I thought it was Neil Harris.<br />
<br />
David: He was the one we worked with but it was Sugarman.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because he came from Commodore. I didn't know it was Joe Sugarman.<br />
<br />
David: He ran a company called JS&A for Joe Sugarman and Associates. They<br />
were the first one that took these full page ads in lots of<br />
different magazines and the quarter page...<br />
<br />
Betsy: The first advertorials.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, advertorial. The first print advertorials. Really serious<br />
stuff. Out of that, he spawned at least a dozen other companies.<br />
Sharper Image is a Sugarman and it's a spinoff. They've got a whole<br />
page just focused on this air ionizer or some crazy product, but he<br />
sold tons of that stuff. Then he started offering courses. He was<br />
on the verge of doing some big deal with Atari and so he knew all<br />
the people out there.<br />
I had taken his course and started running the ad. In fact, there's<br />
probably one in one of those issues that is basically a Sugarman<br />
ad. And so anyway, you took the course, too. So we got to know him.<br />
He got to know us, and we kept up. And, oh, OK. Creative Computing<br />
has folded, and I'm trying to get something going with Atari and<br />
getting their magazine really serious. And so he was the one that<br />
hooked us up with them. By the way, I'm surprised that you don't<br />
have Atari Explorer on your website<br />
<br />
Kevin: On the website? Well, the deal with my Atari magazines website is<br />
I've always strove to get permission. Atari can't be owned by the<br />
same company for more than three months at time.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's hard to get permission that way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You can't get permission. But it's out there, elsewhere. There are<br />
other archivists who don't bother to get permission. That's another<br />
good way to do things. Yeah, it's out there. I think Archive.org<br />
has it.<br />
<br />
David: Really? Yeah, because I hadn't seen it. I was looking for<br />
something...I still get inquires every once in a while from<br />
somebody that wants something in one of the previous magazines that<br />
we've published.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That's why I don't' risk it. There's a few magazine that I just<br />
absolutely would not, because it's owned by some giant monolith<br />
corporation now, and they need to hold on everything even if it's<br />
30 years old.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because someday they might be able to make money from it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right. That's why that's not there.<br />
Talk to me about...You did some weird stuff. The weird stuff I'm<br />
thinking of is the board game.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: "Computer Rage."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We just saw that. We might not have even remembered what it was it,<br />
but we saw it last night at the museum.<br />
<br />
David: They have one in the Collection's area of the Computer Museum. They<br />
didn't even know that we published it. I thought, "Look at this."<br />
<br />
Kevin: You did Computer Rage, which was weird; I want to ask you about<br />
that. You did the record album.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The record album made way more sense than the game.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, well it was a guy named Allan. He was a colonel at that time<br />
and he came to see me with the idea for the computer game.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I forgot about that.<br />
<br />
David: He was a colonel in the Army and had something to do with<br />
educational programs. The Army said people should know more about<br />
how computers work and everything else. He said, "The games that<br />
are on the market are pretty tacky and not fun. I've devised<br />
something." We worked together with him. We finally decided, "All<br />
right. We'll publish this game. By the way, he's a general and<br />
finally retired.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But he's not financing his retirement with [inaudible 00:54:29] .<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: No, not at all.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Will anyone buy this?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We did overprint.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't a big seller or big success, but we sold enough of them.<br />
Now the record was a little different. There was a guy named Dick<br />
Moberg who, at the time, was the president of the Philadelphia Area<br />
Computer Society. The first two personal computer festivals were<br />
actually in New Jersey, not the west coast. The West Coast Computer<br />
Faire came later with Jim Warren and that group. John Dilks started<br />
this computer festival in Atlantic City. This was before Atlantic<br />
City was a big casino place, but...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well, it was a casino place, but...<br />
<br />
David: ...but it was pretty tacky.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It still is.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Not like now.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not like now where it's so classy.<br />
<br />
David: In any event, they were having some issues with the hotel and the<br />
convention center in Atlantic City. Dick Moberg said, "We people in<br />
Philadelphia can do a better job than you guys in New Jersey." And<br />
he got together with what was his name? Lenny? And<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh! Saul Levis.<br />
<br />
David: Saul Levis, who was the president of the New Jersey amateur<br />
computer group. The two of them got together and said yeah, it'll<br />
be more convenient if we do a thing in Philadelphia. And Saul<br />
Levis, he had put together the first Trenton computer festival. It<br />
wasn't a big huge thing; it's gotten to be gigantic. In any event<br />
they said OK, we'll do this. At that point, this was '78; the Apple<br />
had just come out and people were making little plug-in<br />
peripherals.<br />
There was a company that...I'm not going to be able to remember who<br />
it was. They made a nice little plug-in board for the Apple. What<br />
they had was a very nice thing on the screen where you could<br />
position notes and then have them played back. So it was a visual<br />
programming of music.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Music Construction Center?<br />
<br />
Betsy: There were ads for it in magazines.<br />
<br />
David: No, it was a guy out of Denver. I don't remember. Anyway, before<br />
that everything had appeared line by line. But there were some<br />
reasonable playback systems that were starting to come on the<br />
market for the S-100 bus. There were about four of them. The<br />
programming was a little bit harrier, but nonetheless they sounded<br />
OK. And then there was still the leftovers in a sense that people<br />
that were doing work on mainframes to process music.<br />
So Dick Moberg said, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could get a number<br />
of these together?" And of course there's the Philadelphia<br />
Orchestra, we'll make it a Philadelphia Computer Music Festival! So<br />
it was largely his idea, but then, how do you publicize it? Well,<br />
you've got this magazine that's in your backyard, that was willing<br />
to recruit some people and publicize it. So we got about...I don't<br />
know at the festival there were probably 25 or 30 people that had<br />
stuff.<br />
<br />
They recorded it all, which in retrospect was a bit of a mistake<br />
because they had problems with one of the two channels in the<br />
stereo. They had the big reel-to-reel tape recorder, one of the<br />
channels was seriously too low. And then they said, "Well, we've<br />
got this wonderful tape; what are we going to do with it?" And I<br />
said, "Well, I'll do something with it."<br />
<br />
I hooked up with a studio in the city that made records, and we<br />
went in there and corrected the low channel a little bit, not<br />
totally, but enough that it sounded like stereo. And put together a<br />
vinyl record!<br />
<br />
I edited out a lot of the poor quality performances, made the<br />
record, and that sold! It sold pretty well. Our biggest problem was<br />
shipping. How do you ship a 12-inch vinyl record without it<br />
breaking? But that sold pretty well. That, of course, died off<br />
along with everything else when Creative Computing got killed by<br />
Ziff. But, I still had the original test pressing of that, the<br />
original, original.<br />
<br />
I played it back, and it sounded very good. Put it into, I forget<br />
what the software was, but, it was one, the digital routine. It<br />
would have been nice if I still had the original tape, but, I<br />
didn't. But, OK, it's got a little bit of deterioration, going to a<br />
record.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, we're not talking about losing overtones of a<br />
violin up at 15,000 hertz. It was within a narrow band, to begin<br />
with, in any event. But that did let me totally correct the left<br />
channel and bring it up to what it should be. I put that out. I'm<br />
selling CDs now, of that.<br />
<br />
In fact, a guy from Australia ordered one, and obviously, the<br />
postage to send anything overseas is a lot more. He said, "Why<br />
don't you just make MP3 files out of it?" Because, they're WAV<br />
files, the way they are now. I go, "OK."<br />
<br />
This is very recent, like within the last couple of weeks, I<br />
downloaded some software, "Convert WAV to MP3," converted it, sent<br />
them the files. They said, "That's great." What I think what I'll<br />
probably do is try to figure out how I can make them available from<br />
a website.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You've apparently forgotten that, like, 10 years ago, I did that.<br />
They're there.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. I know.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They're at vintagecomputermusic.com.<br />
<br />
David: Are they MP3s?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Well, then, I don't have to do it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You dummy.<br />
<br />
David: Bam. I did remember. I didn't know that you did them all. I thought<br />
you did a sample.<br />
<br />
Kevin: No. They're all there. I can see you're getting reflux.<br />
<br />
David: Boom. I wasted a little time. I waste a lot of time, these days.<br />
That was a cool thing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just think it was neat that you guys were willing to take chances<br />
with weird stuff.<br />
<br />
David: Where we took chances with really weird stuff was in the software.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Software publishing?<br />
<br />
David: We had a brand called, Sensational Software. Unfortunately, Ziff<br />
decided it was competing with some potential advertisers, which it<br />
was, in a sense. They killed it off. But, we had some really good<br />
stuff. We had the Apple game, what the heck was it? It was ported<br />
directly over from the arcade games.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Was it, "Space Invaders"?<br />
<br />
David: "Space Invaders."<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was a clone of, "Space Invaders"?<br />
<br />
David: It was the real.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You got it from, Jeff Lee's guy.<br />
<br />
David: Because, "Space Invaders," the Japanese game, was one of the first<br />
full-sized console video games where they used a general-purpose<br />
chip. "Space Invaders," was programmed for the 6502, Apple.<br />
We bought it from this Japanese company, and we had the only real<br />
"Space Invaders" game. That was one, and a couple of others that we<br />
really could have gone places with. That was just about the time<br />
that Ziff came in and said, "Nah, you can't have this anymore."<br />
<br />
They were into printed media, so, they kept the books going, but,<br />
not any of the other stuff. The other thing we had, was, speaking<br />
of computer music, a little division, that probably could have<br />
gotten a lot bigger, called Peripherals Plus. We were marketing a<br />
little computer music board, it was an S-100 bus once. But if we<br />
had then...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Didn't we have a plotter, too?<br />
<br />
David: Yep. We had about five or six interesting, low-level products. But,<br />
again, Ziff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That stuff was really competing with the advertisers.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Obviously, that wasn't our intent. But, yes it was. We also<br />
offered courses at that time. Do you remember, at County College?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't.<br />
<br />
David: That was just at when we moved into the new building at Hanover. We<br />
had two people that were doing that.<br />
<br />
Betsy: One of them was that crazy, Larry guy. He was seriously weird.<br />
<br />
David: County College of Morris, we reached an agreement that we would<br />
teach their Introductory Computer course. Not for their day<br />
students, but they offered evening courses, adult education, we<br />
were doing that. Fingers in a lot of pies, at that point.<br />
Actually, from that standpoint, it was, probably, good that Ziff<br />
got us a little bit more focused, and back to the roots of<br />
publishing. Getting spread a little thin.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You went to Atari, got the Atari game, and you did the "Atari<br />
Explorer," right?<br />
<br />
David: "Atari Explorer." They had had an occasional publication, not<br />
really a magazine, but one that was focused on the games, and they<br />
decided that they could start that one up again. It started up with<br />
a new name. We called it, "Atarian." It was focused, basically, on<br />
video games. You buy one of their video games and you get an issue.<br />
Anyway, there were different ways that they were going to promote<br />
it.<br />
But, a year later Nintendo just, absolutely, buried "Atarian," in<br />
'89. They kept Atari Spore going for, I think, two more issues,<br />
right?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Was it two?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember the details.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't much.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I remember why they killed it.<br />
<br />
David: Ms. Feisty here. Come on. You've got to tell the story here.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They were playing games with our printer. Production schedule.<br />
Everybody had a production schedule. We never missed our production<br />
date, getting things to the printer, getting them mailed. We just<br />
did it because that's what you had to do. I will probably get sued<br />
for this. Atari started not paying the printer and the printer says<br />
we're not going to print this until we get paid. The date kept<br />
slipping and slipping and the subscribers would be calling up and<br />
saying, "Where's my magazine?"<br />
This went on. It was bi-monthly. It went on for maybe six months. I<br />
finally wrote an editorial in which I explained to the readers<br />
exactly what was going on. They didn't see it until it was printed.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
David: That didn't get into the magazine, though.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It did.<br />
<br />
David: That's right, it did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They never saw it. We were producing it out of [inaudible 01:10:07]<br />
New Jersey and printing it in eastern Pennsylvania and they never<br />
saw it until it was too late. My tenure was cut short but I didn't<br />
really care at that point. I was sick of them. It was really hard.<br />
They're not easy people to deal with, even when the owners last for<br />
more than three months. That was my suicide by editorial. The only<br />
time in my life I've ever been fired.<br />
<br />
David: I didn't realize they didn't read that beforehand but I should<br />
have. I should have.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] I probably wouldn't have gotten fired if they had.<br />
<br />
David: That was the straw that broke the camera's back.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But then John [inaudible 01:11:05] kept doing it a little bit.<br />
<br />
David: I know. In a lot of cases, particularly with the games magazine,<br />
they wanted to approve everything that went in it. If you do an<br />
objective product review, you call it like it is. Oh m gosh, there<br />
was one, it wasn't just one product but a roundup after Consumer<br />
Electronics' show, and I don't remember what it was. Atari had<br />
brought out some new products that really weren't ready to go.<br />
In some cases I just said, "I'm not going to say anything about<br />
this one or these two or three. I'll focus on the ones that are<br />
ready to go or are in good shape." Oh my gosh. "What about this?<br />
This is a wonderful thing." "Well, maybe it will be but it isn't<br />
yet." We had issues all along on censorship and them changing what<br />
we had written and everything. As Betsy said, they were not nice<br />
people to work with. I forget, the two brothers.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Trammell.<br />
<br />
David: Trammell, yeah. That came from Commodore.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Jack and somebody else. Jack and his brother.<br />
<br />
David: It was interesting because yesterday I saw Nolan Bushnell. He was<br />
at that event. Nolan was flamboyant, but basically he had integrity<br />
and he was an honest guy. Man, oh man. Didn't stay and the<br />
corporation changed after he left.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Then you're done with Atari and then it's straight to military<br />
vehicles there?<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] No.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was a hiatus.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, man. We published magazines, in-house magazines, for a couple<br />
other organizations. Did one for Nabisco called...I don't even<br />
remember but it was for their marketing department. Published that<br />
for some period of time and then they decided to bring it in-house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was more like a newsletter.<br />
<br />
David: It was 16 pages. It was getting there.<br />
<br />
Betsy: 16 pages is a newsletter.<br />
<br />
David: All right. Magazine format. Let's put it that way. We did some<br />
fulfillment. Basically, a lot of freelance writing on the travel<br />
field.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Stuffed dogs. The stuffed dogs. Remember those four dogs for my<br />
brother?<br />
<br />
David: That's fulfillment. Fulfillment for Con Edison. I published a<br />
couple newsletters for a while, one called "Effective Investing"<br />
and one called "Effective Communication" for writers. We're talking<br />
early '90s.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was when people still cared, thought that there might be a<br />
correct way to do something and they wanted to know what it was.<br />
<br />
David: That was focused on "Take this computer and start to use it as a<br />
tool. Don't be afraid of the thing." '91/'92 not everybody was<br />
using a computer yet or a personal computer. That was the<br />
orientation of that. Then the other thing we got into big time was<br />
we'd been involved with a local rescue mission for men with drug,<br />
alcohol, homeless issues and we were writing and producing their<br />
newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We were producing all of their fundraising material.<br />
<br />
David: We started, I think, with the newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, we did everything. Appeal letters and newsletters and<br />
maintaining their database, the donor database. It took a lot of<br />
time.<br />
<br />
David: We did that for five years. Then '96 I got an opportunity to buy<br />
this crazy military vehicles magazine for people that were<br />
restoring old historic military vehicles. It was a magazine but it<br />
was I guess more of a glorified newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was horrible.<br />
<br />
David: It was horrible but it was really terrible. In fact, the editor or<br />
the publisher, whatever, the owner, he'd take the articles however<br />
the writer would send them. If it was double spaced type, boom,<br />
that's what would appear in the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Save all the typesetting.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He had zero typesetting expense.<br />
<br />
David: Zero editing. He just took anything that came in, put it in. Ads<br />
the same way. Half the ads were hand written. Well, not half, but a<br />
significant number had corrections on them by hand. Oh my gosh. It<br />
was so terrible. I made it into a real magazine and built it up. At<br />
that point the circulation had been about 10,000. We built it up<br />
and we were pushing close to 20,000 magazines. It was a real<br />
magazine. I sold it to Crowsey publications.<br />
Then they, which I did not realize at the time, the owner, Chet<br />
Crowsey, had put the whole company up for sale and he sold the<br />
company a year or two later to some other specialty magazine<br />
publisher. We're talking narrow, narrow niche. They published a lot<br />
of, what'd they call it, white tail bow hunting. Really, really<br />
narrow stuff. Up in northern Wisconsin is where they were based. In<br />
any event, he sold it.<br />
<br />
The new publishers, their whole stick was making money. They<br />
immediately raised the subscription price of military vehicles. We<br />
were charging $18 a year which was fine and they raised it to<br />
$21.95 or something and they raised the advertising rates and<br />
everything else.<br />
<br />
The last I knew, the circulation was back down around 10,000.<br />
[laughs] It doesn't pay off to take that approach. I didn't have<br />
the same emotional connection, with that as I did with Creative<br />
Computing and the other magazines there. Fine, you do what you want<br />
with the magazine, it's OK.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You didn't care too much?<br />
<br />
David: Nah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What do you guys do now? It seems like charity work and [inaudible<br />
01:19:45] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. I run a non-profit called Beyond the Walls and he runs his<br />
website and does Bible studies.<br />
<br />
David: Right. Actually, Betsy, the organization she has, she's executive<br />
director of Beyond the Wall, that's gotten huge.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's getting bigger and bigger.<br />
<br />
David: It's gotten huge.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think huge is probably an exaggeration.<br />
<br />
David: Well, not huge like a Gates Foundation thing.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I wish. We started in 2005 with 26 volunteers going to Guatemala to<br />
work with this organization that works with the people who scavenge<br />
in the Guatemala City garbage dump. The dump is in a ravine. It<br />
started in the early '50s and as it has filled up around the edges<br />
they put a couple layers of sand on it and let it sit for a bit and<br />
then the people build houses on it out of scraps and things that<br />
they made.<br />
This organization called Potter's House that we work with has been<br />
working with them for 26 years. They have an education program,<br />
micro-enterprise and health and various things that they do. Since<br />
2005 we've been sending volunteer teams. We're not the only ones<br />
sending volunteer teams down there to build houses and do<br />
healthcare and do stuff with the kids. So we started with 26 and by<br />
the end of the year we'll be well over 150 volunteers. We'll have<br />
three weeks this summer, I'll have 135 over three weeks this<br />
summer.<br />
<br />
It started in our backyard and one of the reasons that we wanted<br />
to...It started in the church and we started the organization<br />
partially because it's easier to raise money if you're not a church<br />
and it's also easier to make the volunteer opportunities available<br />
to people. If you say "Oh I'm going to Guatemala." "Oh I'd love to<br />
go with you! Who's going?" "It's my church." "Oh."<br />
<br />
But, if it's this local non-profit it's more appealing and we've<br />
really succeeded in doing that because we have people not only from<br />
in our own community, but this year we're going to have a family<br />
from Oklahoma, about six families from Texas, several people from<br />
Florida.<br />
<br />
David: You got the Virginia.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Virginia. It's like oh my goodness. How is this happening?<br />
<br />
Kevin: And everyone goes out to Guatemala and does the [inaudible<br />
01:22:31] ?<br />
[cross talk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. We all meet in Guatemala. I have three teams. One each week,<br />
and I'll be there the whole time and they'll come down and probably<br />
each team will build two or three houses. They'll do medical<br />
clinic, they'll do day camp for kids, soccer or baseball, sports<br />
things.<br />
They were about teenagers, so they love to do the...Everybody does<br />
construction in the morning. Then, in the afternoon teenage girls<br />
and some of the boys who want to do other stuff will help out with<br />
these other kid-related activities. That's what I'm doing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My wife is in Africa this week and last doing something similar.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Cool.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Which is why I have to leave shortly to go get my kids.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: What part of Africa is she in?<br />
<br />
Kevin: She did some stuff for Special Olympics. Then, they were helping<br />
build something at a food bank. I don't know that much yet, because<br />
she's not home yet.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Cool.<br />
<br />
David: That's terrific. She'll be changed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: She keeps telling that she wished I could've come, and I do, too.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You have this kid. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: We've got the two kids. The six-year-old doesn't feed herself real<br />
well.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: She can't drive to school.<br />
<br />
David: Your annual budget has gone from 0 to what? Are you going to hit<br />
about 150, 200,000 this year?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's over 300 already.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, OK. [laughs] 300.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's small potatoes compared to...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: As my boss, the Chairman of the Board, and I'm the only employee,<br />
is fond of saying, "The people out there don't realize that we're<br />
just a bunch of schlumps sitting around a table making this stuff<br />
up as we go along. Very good leadership. He's a very good leader.<br />
<br />
David: We were trying to maybe see if we can touch base with the Gates<br />
Foundation when we were up there. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: We got a brochure into his hands.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we got a brochure into his hands and some other stuff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was Bill Gates there?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah. I had a picture of him that I had taken at the first<br />
Altair convention in 1976, before he had actually made the deal<br />
with Altair to develop BASIC. He had said, "I can do it," but they<br />
hadn't signed the whole thing. I've got a picture of him as a 20-<br />
year-old or thereabouts, talking at this little convention.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You showed it to him?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. I gave him a copy. The problem I had is that...some people<br />
keep everything. I pretty much give everything away.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, you are lying. You keep everything.<br />
<br />
David: I do keep a lot of stuff. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Then, you give it away later. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Well, when Stan Freiberger was putting together the "Fire in<br />
the Valley" book, I gave him a lot of photographs and I gave him<br />
the originals. Then the publisher said, "It's not good enough. The<br />
photo. You get the negative." OK, they're gone. Never any of that<br />
came back. In fact, what I had to do is scan the photo from the<br />
book to make the print to give to Bill.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Photos of being young and cute.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was his Woody Allen phase. He looked exactly like Woody Allen<br />
did at that phase in his life.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:26:30] too.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm sure there is.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It is a lot [inaudible 01:26:33] .<br />
<br />
David: She improves with age. Every year.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I saw the picture! You look the same.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, the instant Paul Allen showed up, of course, everybody's<br />
mingling around this museum. All of a sudden there was like an<br />
arrow head over in that direction.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was this sucking sound.<br />
<br />
David: And then Bill shows up and, oh my God, everybody has to go see<br />
Bill.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was talking to Bob Rynett this morning, the guy who organized it,<br />
and he said, "Oh, Paul was very happy. Paul was very pleased with<br />
the way the event went." He said his only regret was that he and<br />
Bill didn't have enough time to spend with the people. And I'm<br />
thinking, "Well, OK, if you just stayed a little longer."<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Well, at least Paul Allen did come to the dinner.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, he stayed a little longer, but Bill, he was in and out like<br />
a...<br />
<br />
David: Bill was there for maybe an hour.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He just showed up because he had to.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, exactly. It was a cameo.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:27:52] cameo there?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, yes. There I am. I was thinner then. Oh! There's Ted in his<br />
hat! And Peter [inaudible 01:28:02] . Who's that guy?<br />
<br />
David: Dick Heiser was at the convention and he had one of the hats. The<br />
Xanadu hat.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was wearing one of those hats. The rings were actually silver.<br />
Oh and there's Johnny Anderson. He's the one that wrote that<br />
crazy...<br />
<br />
This was our building.<br />
<br />
David: That was the greenhouse garage building that we started. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: And there was a hole. Was it you or my brother that made a hole in<br />
the wall for an air conditioner?<br />
<br />
David: It was your brother.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And the building was painted white after...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is that the air conditioner? You comment about the low tech air<br />
conditioning.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, that was in an actual window. This building had been painted<br />
white after and right about here a hole had been made in the wall<br />
for this through-the-wall air conditioner. It was rented and when<br />
we moved out, we had this hole in the wall. So, my brother takes<br />
this spare ceiling panel that we had. It was white and sort of<br />
stuffed it in the hole and filled it up so that it really didn't<br />
show any more. We never heard any more about it.<br />
<br />
David: That building today is...<br />
<br />
Betsy: They've made it very fancy.<br />
<br />
David: Oh my gosh! It's a boutique shop and it's really nice. And they<br />
didn't even tear it down. It wasn't a tear-down and rebuild. At any<br />
event, we were not into spending money on facilities. Absolutely<br />
not. The last place that we were in was a printing company had<br />
owned it and they had taken three very small houses that backed up<br />
to railroad tracks and then they built a large warehouse at the end<br />
that was relatively modern. Then they just connected the three<br />
houses with little walkway and so we were in the first house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You couldn't tell that it was two houses.<br />
<br />
David: No. The art department was in the second, then the software group<br />
was in the third one. We had our fulfillment and storage and stuff<br />
in the warehouse.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How much money did you spend on the facility?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not much.<br />
<br />
David: We were spending money on expansion, growing, grow, grow. Then Ziff<br />
Davis comes in, they say, "You got this wonderful warehouse."<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's our warehouse now, right?<br />
<br />
David: That's right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It wasn't though, because you owned it.<br />
<br />
David: I know, but in any event, they said we're going to use it. We're<br />
moving some of your operation, advertising, sales into New York,<br />
therefore you will have more space. It wasn't the trade-off of the<br />
same kind of space or anything. What they did is, they have all<br />
these other magazines at that point, things like "Popular Boating"<br />
and "Yachting" and everything else. All of those magazines, when<br />
you subscribed you got a premium. You got a tote bag or something.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A backpack or a cushion.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. They moved all of their premium fulfillment out to our<br />
warehouse. They said, "Because you're not going to have a software<br />
department anymore, so you won't have to ship any software. We're<br />
going to bring all of our premiums out there." We still have<br />
"Yachting" bags.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yachting bags and seat bags.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Speaking of fulfillment that was something that we did. We were<br />
real pioneers in doing our own fulfillment.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: That's true...<br />
<br />
Betsy: All magazines then used fulfillment houses. You would just send all<br />
the little cards and white mail and everything to your fulfillment<br />
house and they would just take care, enter it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Reader service cards and...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Exactly, and then they would send the labels.<br />
<br />
David: Everything went either to Boulder, Colorado, Des Moines, Iowa, or<br />
some place in Florida.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So when you say pioneers, does that mean you were cheap?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well no, because we were not getting good service, we weren't happy<br />
with the service the readers were getting. And so we decided to<br />
bring it in it house, and we brought a program from a company in<br />
Boston that had written a program to run a PDP11.<br />
And we did we brought the whole thing in-house. We had our own data<br />
entry people. Did all the caging, taking the money out in-house.<br />
Printed our own labels and ship, because then you had to print them<br />
and ship them because there was no electronic delivery.<br />
<br />
David: You know we were real pioneers there and we did spent some money.<br />
Because PDP1170 was not a low-end, with a platter and disk, 12<br />
inch, maybe 15 inch, but a big, big platter drive, and data entry<br />
terminals, DECWriters, VT05. And when Ziff came in, I mean they<br />
were blown away that we were doing our own fulfillment, and doing a<br />
very efficiently.<br />
And the other thing we were doing also was the reader service<br />
cards. We were doing all our own processing of that. The same<br />
computer is same system. A Mini Data System, that's what it was.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No.<br />
<br />
David: No? OK.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mini data was the one you were using...<br />
<br />
[Day 2]<br />
<br />
<br />
David: A couple of the questions you asked yesterday got us to thinking<br />
about things we probably should have mentioned or clarified.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK let's go, let me grab a pen.<br />
<br />
David: One of the corrections, Betsy remembered better than I. the<br />
embezzlement that we were talking about was actually 79 not 78 it<br />
doesn't make a lot of difference but was a year later. It was a<br />
year after I had left my day job, and I was really depending upon<br />
Creative Computing for my income and everything else. So to lose<br />
that was a big blow at that time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So that could have been the end of things right there?<br />
<br />
David: Yes absolutely it could have.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was 79 not 78, is what you're saying.<br />
<br />
David: That's what I said it was 79 not 78.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I was going to ask you to move closer to the microphone.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Actually I don't have to do this. My ego is completely uninvolved.<br />
I would go sit and play with the cats.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Please, please be here. You supplement Dave's memory.<br />
<br />
David: Yes exactly she's very good at that.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: I want to know, how are you going to know how to spell things? He<br />
used the name John Dilks. If you go to write it out, how do you<br />
know how to spell John Dilks?<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'll either Google it, and if it's not in Wikipedia, I'll have to<br />
come back to you and ask, or if they're mentioned in the magazines.<br />
I'll do my best.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm not saying it in a critical way, I'm just impressed that you<br />
don't ask.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just feel this way, I can have everything. I don't have to write<br />
it down. I can concentrate on the conversation, rather than taking<br />
notes.<br />
<br />
David: OK. One thing I thought would be kind of worthwhile...putting the<br />
whole era of the early computer magazines into a perspective. In a<br />
sense, personal computing itself went through several eras as it<br />
accelerated and became so widespread. It certainly didn't start<br />
that way.<br />
You almost have to look at a period before there were personal<br />
computers -- the pre-personal computer era, which I would say would<br />
be 1972 or so up through '75, when the first computers came out.<br />
What was happening then was you had big time-sharing systems.<br />
<br />
Then, manufacturers like DEC and HP were making smaller time-<br />
sharing systems for terminals on a computer. Specifically, Bob<br />
Albrecht opened up People's Computer Company down in San Carlos,<br />
San Mateo, one of the "Sans." It was an open to the public place.<br />
What were people going to do with computers? Well, he wrote this<br />
book of what to do after you hit return, of games.<br />
<br />
Then I wrote my book, not for his center, but for people in the<br />
east that had access to the same type of things on DEC computers.<br />
Those two books actually came out in '72. That was well<br />
before....There was an impetus for people to use computers. Even<br />
though it was mini-computers and they didn't really have their own,<br />
they did have access.<br />
<br />
That, I think, was an important thing because, then, when the kit<br />
computers first came out, which is '75, we really had the kit<br />
computer era from '75 to around '78. That's when it primary was,<br />
the do-it-yourself, build-it-yourself.<br />
<br />
Who did those computers appeal to? It was largely people who were<br />
OK with things like soldering guns. That was largely HAM radio<br />
people. You look at "73" magazine and "Radio Electronics," those<br />
were the ones that dragged the hardware people into the field, and<br />
"Popular Electronics," of course, with the Altair in January, '75.<br />
<br />
You had to know something about, and be a little bit capable with<br />
your hands to get into it. That continued but dwindled off by 1980,<br />
because of course, in '78, you had the three biggies, not biggies,<br />
but self-contained, assembled computers: the Commodore PET, TRS-80,<br />
and the Apple all came out in '78. They were proprietary platforms,<br />
nobody was sharing stuff.<br />
<br />
Actually, the S-100 bus was more shareable. More people got a card<br />
that you could plug into the S-100 bus. There was more, but on the<br />
other hand, you had to build it. That was really a stumbling block<br />
for a lot of people. Then processor technology with the SAL. OK,<br />
here's an S-100 bus machine, but it's all built. That was a big<br />
leap.<br />
<br />
Anyway, you had the, what I call, proprietary era from '78 to '82.<br />
Then it kind of dwindled off, although Apple certainly kept going.<br />
When the IBM PC came out, '81, '82, '83, that ushered in the<br />
standardization era. Everybody, "OK, we're going to make an IBM PC<br />
clone." It was really only Apple, and to a lesser extent, the Atari<br />
and the Commodore that kept going with their own proprietary stuff.<br />
They really couldn't keep going.<br />
<br />
At that time, we started working with Atari. They using the same<br />
chip that Apple had. I thought, "Man, that's an opportunity. Why<br />
don't they just make an agreement with Apple to run Apple software<br />
and everything." They got a 6502, that family of chips in there,<br />
why not? But that wasn't Atari's way of doing things, as you well<br />
know.<br />
<br />
In any event, they went through those stages. As a new one came<br />
along, the other one died off. That though then affected the<br />
magazines, Creative Computing, we came from the pre-era, in a<br />
sense. From the education applications and people having access to<br />
small, minicomputer time sharing systems. When Altair basic was<br />
announced, then it was the obvious thing that we would port over<br />
programs to that.<br />
<br />
Other magazines such as "Byte" and some of the hardware magazines,<br />
they really came from the HAM radio end of things. Wayne Green, who<br />
started "Byte," was publishing "73," which was the biggest magazine<br />
in HAM radio. HAM fests were one of the earliest places where<br />
computers were, or at least hardware, do-it-yourself computers were<br />
really seen and popularized. Wasn't till a little later that we had<br />
computer festivals.<br />
<br />
The real early computer festivals in '75, '76, had a big overlap<br />
with Ham radio. The early ones in New Jersey. That was the earliest<br />
ones. It was, I think, more, not more, but at least half was<br />
oriented to Ham radio. Then, it broadened out, of course, with more<br />
applications being reproduced. Anyway, I think it's kind of<br />
important to know how things fit into that whole scheme of things.<br />
<br />
Magazines either came from the Ham radio and hardware side of<br />
things. They had a different perspective than those like Creative<br />
Computing.<br />
<br />
Well, Peoples' Computer Company, Bob Aldberg, could have had a real<br />
winning magazine, but he was too much in the alternative mode. So,<br />
Peoples' Computer Company never really made it as a magazine. He<br />
didn't want to do advertising or anything that would...<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was a different avenue. It was more like a tabloid-style<br />
newspaper.<br />
<br />
David: Newspaper, yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was more glossy.<br />
<br />
David: Exactly.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was a very different field.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Again, magazine publishing. I remember, early on, I was on a<br />
TV show. McNeil Lehrer Report on Public Broadcasting. Life Magazine<br />
was being re-launched and Time-Warner was spending a ton of money<br />
on this re-launch. They had the publisher of Life Magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was probably Time-Life back then. I don't think it...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. That's right. It wasn't Time. Well, I think it was close to<br />
the time that they merged. Anyway. Yeah. It was Time-Life. Then,<br />
they had me. Sort of the opposite extreme.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You're going to be covered in cat hair by the time you're here.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, I am sure.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's OK. But it matches and sort of goes with it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. It matches fine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You have kind of a theme here. The black and white.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes. Yes. Sorry to interrupt.<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, they were interviewing both of us. They were going to spend<br />
more money on their first issue than our entire annual budget, for<br />
everything. The difference in big publishers, because we we're<br />
talking about that a little bit yesterday, is huge. Really huge.<br />
Now, the interesting thing is there was a magazine back then. I<br />
don't know if it's still around today, called Folio. It was a<br />
magazine for magazine publishers. They covered all aspects of it.<br />
Subscription fulfillment, typesetting and everything else and the<br />
business aspects of running a magazine.<br />
<br />
They had some figures, which were true for a long period of time.<br />
That one out of seven magazine startups makes it for one year. One<br />
out of seven. That's low. Of those, one out of seven makes it for<br />
five years. So, were talking about...<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think Wayne told me almost the exact same statistic.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. One out of 50 new magazines makes it for five years or more.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: Once you make it five years, you're probably good to go for awhile.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
The new Life Magazine comes back, roaring back in. Where are they<br />
today, or even 10 years later from that point. Gone. Didn't make<br />
it. In any event, yesterday we were talking a little bit about<br />
where did we put all our money.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
David: Well, all our money wasn't an awful lot compared to big publishers.<br />
We were a small player. We're big in that field, but...<br />
<br />
Kevin: You're a big fish in a little bowl.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Yeah. There wasn't a lot. Betsy reminded me this morning that<br />
one of the things we did to, in a sense, keep control, is we bought<br />
our own typesetting equipment.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Used of course.<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Used.<br />
<br />
David: Used. Yes. We didn't want to send stuff out to a typesetter<br />
where...what did you [inaudible 00:14:22] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was the same thing with the fulfillment. You are sending it to a<br />
service that gives your work to a minimum wage person who couldn't<br />
care less. Puts her time in and...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Plus you still had code and things that needed to be done right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Done right. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Otherwise it was useless.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. We didn't typeset the code usually. We would actually pace<br />
down the printouts. Part of it was for efficiency and probably, in<br />
the long run, it was cheaper. Just to turn your typesetting around,<br />
send it out and wait for your galleys to come back. Then you<br />
proofread them. Then you'd send it back. Then they make the<br />
corrections maybe and you get it back again. So we said, well...and<br />
then we got this used, copy graphic was it?<br />
<br />
David: Mm-hmm. Yep.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Typesetter. Found a young woman who knew typesetting and hired her.<br />
We bought our own stat camera. We always used to have to send all<br />
the stats and [inaudible 00:15:34] out to be made.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: That was huge then before...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Had our own darkroom.<br />
<br />
David: ...everything was computerized publishing. Yeah. We had our own<br />
darkroom and our own stat camera with the thing that goes over a<br />
screen basically to make it into dots.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: To do that. To make those negatives or [inaudible 00:15:56] , which<br />
are the positive. That was something again. You sent it out and you<br />
get it back.<br />
I said, "Oh, you know what, we got a little more type here than<br />
expected. We want to crop this. Well, we send it out again, and oh<br />
my gosh." Doing all of that in-house, but it cost money. In a<br />
sense, just for the hardware and capital improvements that you<br />
needed to do that.<br />
<br />
We were spending it on that and expansion into other things like<br />
the software. One of the other ones that I was thinking of that we<br />
did, that certainly, really didn't bring us any tangible reward,<br />
was that we were doing some consulting when we started developing<br />
software. We started doing consulting to places like the<br />
Exploratorium in San Francisco. And Sesame Place. That was a big<br />
one for us.<br />
<br />
Sesame Place was a theme park right in our own backyard in New<br />
Jersey. They were going to have these terminals that you could go<br />
up to. One of the programs was Mix and Match the Muppets. You could<br />
take different parts of Muppets and combine them. We wrote a part<br />
of that routine and a whole bunch of stuff that made computers and<br />
these things not computers but approachable things for kids.<br />
<br />
We did some work for the Capital Children's Museum in Washington<br />
and Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Again, did it help us?<br />
Maybe. Did we gain a little reputation? Maybe. Did it translate to<br />
the bottom line? Probably not. As Betsy said, it was fun for you to<br />
do that, wasn't it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, it was fun. It gave him fun things to do.<br />
<br />
David: That was one way that we, in a sense, spent some money.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It makes sense. You guys were the computer experts, probably by<br />
orders of magnitude. Who are they going to go to?<br />
<br />
David: That's right. Interactive games, yeah. I already had a good selling<br />
book out there that was visible, known. We did a lot of that kind<br />
of stuff. Some of it was just fun to do. Another place where we put<br />
I won't say a lot of money but we went to a lot of these shows,<br />
well, there were some that were strictly personal computer shows,<br />
but then also tried to push into things like the consumer<br />
electronics show.<br />
We were the only magazine at the consumer electronics. That's a<br />
huge, huge show. Twice a year, one in Chicago and one in Las Vegas.<br />
We'd take the smallest booth that you could but, still, it was a<br />
fair chunk of change to go to that, but that's how I felt we got<br />
the reach. They were pushing at a lower level. That was video games<br />
mostly at that point. Although we weren't in that market, I just<br />
felt that that was someplace that we wanted to be.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you think that was worthwhile?<br />
<br />
David: I don't know. We were mainly looking for retail stores to sell the<br />
magazine. That was my main purpose for going there. No, it probably<br />
wasn't. It probably was not and it cost us a lot of money to go to<br />
the shows. You have to experiment and do those things. We started<br />
reporting on new developments at the consumer electronics show and<br />
there was some overlap with Computer Inc but it was mostly video<br />
games. No, it didn't have a real good payoff. [laughs]<br />
Then there was the Boston show we went to where Betsy's feistiness<br />
really came out. You go to those shows. I'm not talking about one<br />
of these local computer shows or something. You go to a big show.<br />
You've got to use union labor. We had a computer at our booth. We<br />
wanted to plug it in. You're going to plug in your computer? No,<br />
you can't plug it in. You've got to hire an electrician for an hour<br />
for $75 to plug in your computer.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was a bit extreme. I don't think that was actually true.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know how much it was but you had to use union labor for<br />
different things. Betsy took exception to that at one show and<br />
actually came to blows.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was carrying stuff off the show floor. We were trying to get out.<br />
It was in Boston and we were going to drive back and we were trying<br />
to...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Go home at the end of the show?<br />
<br />
Betsy: ...go home at the end of the show. We were just carrying our<br />
cartons of leftover magazines and books and some union guy comes to<br />
me and starts telling me you can't do this and he was being very<br />
rude. So I punched him in the arm. [laughs] They were not happy.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you have to hire a special punching person to do that?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yes, exactly. I should have consulted with the shop steward before<br />
doing that.<br />
<br />
David: There was a follow-up to that. I'm not absolutely sure but I think<br />
the guy that was running that show was Shelley Adelman. He then<br />
approached us after that little incident. You can't do this. Betsy<br />
was really in his face about come on. We're a tiny little nit. Sure<br />
we can do it. We can carry our own stuff.<br />
Shelley Adelman, whose name you probably heard today, in a sense,<br />
got his start by running these smaller shows around the country and<br />
then he built up to running PC Expo in New York and Las Vegas and<br />
then he got into you run a show in Las Vegas you've got to make<br />
deals with the hotels and so on.<br />
<br />
The earlier PC shows in Las Vegas did not use the convention<br />
center. They were held in I think probably the Hilton. He got to<br />
know hotel people there and he started buying into hotels and today<br />
Shelley Adelman is huge. Not Caesars but he owns one of the really<br />
big casino operations. He's on Forbes list of top 100 wealthiest<br />
Americans.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sure he only uses union labor.<br />
<br />
David: I'm sure he does, absolutely. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's how he got where he is.<br />
<br />
David: We've crossed paths with some interesting people in different ways.<br />
There was another one I was thinking of. Actually, this is jumping<br />
around a little bit. Editorial, in different people submitting<br />
articles and then some people I would ask would you do something<br />
for us early, early on. That's another thing we went to. I went to<br />
comic cons and the sci-fi cons to promote the magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was early.<br />
<br />
David: That was early, very early. I've got to tell you one little<br />
incident there. I also went to small press publisher conventions. I<br />
went to one over Labor Day weekend, and I don't know what year it<br />
was. It was probably '75, '76 maybe. The place that they gave this<br />
small press to exhibit was one platform up in the subway under<br />
Lincoln Center.<br />
Lincoln Center, of course, huge, but down one level is not shops.<br />
There may be a few shops but it was a big, open platform. That's<br />
where we were exhibiting. I had my magazines out there on a table<br />
and I was talking to these other underground publishers and so on,<br />
typical.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's why they put you there. It's underground.<br />
<br />
David: Underground, yes. It was a Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Saturday,<br />
Sunday, Monday. I said, "I can't be here on Sunday." Talked to the<br />
person next to me and I said, "I'm just going to leave a cigar box<br />
that says put your money in the box." He said, "You're nuts. We're<br />
in a New York subway system. You're going to come back with nothing<br />
in your box." I left a bunch of change in it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: And your ex-wife said you were too trusting.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] Yes. I left like 15 single dollar bills in there so people<br />
could make change and I just left it there, from Saturday to Monday<br />
and I came back Monday, about $40, $50 in the box. I don't know<br />
whether it paid for everything that was taken but it worked out<br />
fine. Yes, I was obviously too trusting, but at roughly the same<br />
time there was something going on. I think it was a sci-fi<br />
convention or world future society. Yeah, it was world future<br />
society convention.<br />
They had some notable people there. I was sitting down with Alvin<br />
Toffler in the lobby of the Colosseum and along comes over to us<br />
Isaac [inaudible 00:27:03] (ED: from context, they are talking about<br />
Isaac Asimov). What a wonderful little party. We had some coffee in<br />
the Colosseum and I said, "Isaac, can you write me an article?"<br />
"I got a good story from the robot series that hasn't been widely<br />
used or published and you can use that." So I got an early <br />
contribution from Isaac [inaudible 00:27:27] and Alvin<br />
Toffler wrote something for us.<br />
<br />
Anyway, got to know some interesting people at that point. Then who<br />
should submit an article, and by this time Betsy was the editor...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Out of transom comes an article from Michael Creighton. It was a<br />
program. I can't remember what it was about.<br />
<br />
David: For the Apple.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was a program for the Apple, but it was something really dumb.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know if you remember, we were reminded when Harry Garland<br />
was up at the thing in Seattle. Harry Garland was one of the first<br />
ones to produce an independent manufactured a board, a 100 bus<br />
board, for the Altair, and this was really early, and he called it<br />
the TV Dazzler. It made little squares light up but he could make<br />
lots of them light up in different colors or just a few. It was a<br />
silly program but people said we can do graphics on this.<br />
He eventually developed it into quite an interesting graphics tool,<br />
I guess. People did buy the TV Dazzler for itself but the purpose<br />
was here's a board you could produce graphics, do some graphics. In<br />
any event, that's essentially what Michael Creighton's program did<br />
for the Apple. Not much.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This was not early on.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, it was after the Apple 2 was out.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was probably...<br />
<br />
David: '80.<br />
<br />
Betsy: 1980, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you publish it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. I rejected it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: I'm like we're going to reject an article from Michael Creighton?<br />
<br />
Betsy: We both liked Michael Creighton as an article.<br />
<br />
David: Oh my gosh. But we did. We really did. We had standards.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Later on, though, he wrote something. It was better. It wasn't<br />
great. He did write something better and we did accept it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Orson Scott Card wrote for Compute, I think. I don't know if he was<br />
Orson Scott Card at that point, but [inaudible 00:30:00] .<br />
<br />
David: We've crossed paths with some people.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [inaudible 00:30:09] was actually very nice<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, 6 foot 8, big guy. He was very nice. Unfortunately, he died.<br />
On the other end of things, early on, we really were...this was<br />
probably even before Betsy got in...kind of in the small press<br />
underground publishing movement as much as in the legitimate big<br />
magazines, because that's kind of where I started.<br />
<br />
Betsy: When I came, we had just published the first sleek, coated paper<br />
magazine and coated stock. In October 1978, I believe, that was<br />
published. That was the first of the coated stock. That was kind of<br />
the bridge to legitimacy.<br />
<br />
David: For the first two years, [inaudible 00:31:09] news print and I had<br />
a little tie in with some of the small press people. I was learning<br />
about publishing from small press review, I got to know some of the<br />
people who were doing successful publishing. A lot of them were<br />
magazines and comics out of San Francisco.<br />
So I got to know a little bit [inaudible 00:31:46] and Gilbert<br />
Shelton and Sherry Flannigan, and some of those early, Bobby<br />
London. So anyway, one ad we ran real early on was an adaptation of<br />
Renee and Robert Crompton. Go ahead and change my thing to creative<br />
computing. Go for it. Sherry Flannigan she did a comic strip called<br />
Tronch and Bonnie, Tronch was a little dog and Bonnie was a little<br />
girl and they occasionally got mixed up with a robot dog.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there some sort of falling out with that person?<br />
<br />
David: With Sherry? No. I'm still friends with her on Facebook. They had a<br />
major, major problem, she was involved with Gary Hallgrin and I<br />
forget who the publisher was, McNeil, Bobby London. They were the<br />
Air Pirates funniest group that Disney took to task, that caused<br />
the death of a lot of publishing in the underground comics<br />
movement.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I don't understand.<br />
<br />
David: Air Pirates were funny, they were just looking for trouble. They<br />
had Disney characters flying planes and getting into all kinds of<br />
trouble and getting into problems that Disney characters never<br />
would have done, sexual problems as well as just acting badly.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Disney just said, "We can't put up with this." It was an<br />
interesting case, because was it a copyright violation, not really<br />
because they were character look-a-likes, but they weren't calling<br />
them Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck but they looked the same or very<br />
similar. But, it was a landmark case in underground comics, it<br />
caused a lot of them to pull back, a lot on the satire and stuff<br />
that they were publishing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I asked about Sherry because a number of years ago when I had first<br />
put the best of [inaudible 00:34:29] on my website, then after a<br />
while I got an email saying, "Look, you have to take this<br />
[inaudible 00:34:37] ." I would copyright all, it was just like<br />
waving arms. So I took it down but it was, I thought, maybe it<br />
was...<br />
<br />
David: Well that whole copyright trademark thing, there interpretation<br />
that really, really strict...everything that goes on the Internet<br />
is a public domain. Well, that is not really true either. Are you<br />
making money from copyrighted material? If you are then that's a<br />
pretty clear violation. Are you affecting the copyright owners<br />
ability to make money with it? That's a violation.<br />
I'm kind of in this right now with Uruguay and TinTin, those books<br />
have inspired a lot of people to make parodies and fake TinTin<br />
covers. TinTin at the beach, places TinTin wouldn't normally go.<br />
Well is it affecting the sales of TinTin books, or is it actually<br />
increasingly them?<br />
<br />
Casterman, who owns and [inaudible 00:36:07] owns the TinTin<br />
copyrights. They are really going after some of these people, but<br />
I'm not sure that they have a really good case. So some people take<br />
everything off and don't want nothing on the website. And others<br />
are saying, "Hey, this is legitimate." I have collected a lot of<br />
those covers, and put them up on a website.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I guess you'll find out soon enough.<br />
<br />
David: I will find out, soon enough.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They may not be right legally, but how hard do you want to fight<br />
it.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: I think that they have to demonstrate that it's hurting them in<br />
some way. One last thing, from the question you asked yesterday,<br />
back to the money issue, when I sold the magazine, right at that<br />
time I took 15 percent of what I had received, and donated it to<br />
charities. I have in a sense signed on, although not as an official<br />
signee to the Gates-Buffet initiative to give away half of my<br />
wealth, while I am alive.<br />
At one point in time you can compute that, I have already given<br />
away more than I have received for Creative Computing to Charity.<br />
Of course, it had grown a little bit and we made reasonably decent<br />
investments and that is why it continued to grow. But, I'm really<br />
committed to doing that. My kids are not going to inherit it all.<br />
That's just the way it is, that is the way I believe. Put my money<br />
where my heart is. Anyway,<br />
<br />
Kevin: Other question is, you said something yesterday, I should follow up<br />
that one. You said something about stealing Basic.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well there was this big thing. Just the night before last, at this<br />
dinner we went to, where all the people who were at the first MITS<br />
conference and they referred to the letter that Bill Gates wrote.<br />
<br />
Kevin: "Why are you stealing my software?"<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well exactly. That was just a reference to that Bill Gates, which<br />
had just been brought back to my memory by that. People were<br />
telling stories at this. Instead of having an after dinner speaker<br />
they were just passing the mic around and people were talking about<br />
incidents and things from the past.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you get to sell the story to this group of...?<br />
<br />
David: Not really, I was just followed up on something [inaudible<br />
00:39:24] .<br />
<br />
Betsy: Some of those stories were really boring.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: Oh yeah, long and boring. It's an interesting thing though, about<br />
basic itself, but it was developed at an educational institution<br />
originally by Kemeny and Kurtz at Dartmouth. And they, either<br />
deliberately or because they had gotten a lot of grant money from<br />
General Electric in the early time sharing systems, they basically<br />
let anybody use their Basic.<br />
It was developed at Dartmouth but later Honeywell put a system in<br />
at Minnesota or Florida or someplace else. They could use Basic,<br />
they could have a no license fee or anything. That made Basic a<br />
universal language that was available, at least that version of<br />
Basic. If you write a different version of Basic, where does that<br />
fall? These are some sort of violation and you need some<br />
permission. And basically Kemeny and Kurtz said, "No, you don't."<br />
And they allowed Basic to be used and developed by others.<br />
<br />
Digital Equipment, at the same time, maybe even earlier, but<br />
roughly the same time, had developed also an interactive language<br />
called Focal. And Focal in many regards was more efficient than<br />
Basic, because they were running it on many computer and there was<br />
less memory to work with. On the other hand, and this was true<br />
Digital...as time went on, they said, "No, nobody can use Focal. We<br />
are not going to let, especially those people [inaudible 00:41:59]<br />
." But any place else, nobody could use Focal.<br />
<br />
I think it wound up with a situation like Sony and Betamax. Sony<br />
saying, "Betamax is ours and it is a better format that VHS," which<br />
it was. But then, JVC saying, "We have VHS and Toshiba. Hey do you<br />
want to use it? Fine, we'll license it to you for next to nothing."<br />
<br />
Kevin: You think Focal could have been Basic.<br />
<br />
David: I think it could have been very big. I think it could there could<br />
have been very serious competition between the two languages, but<br />
by Digital limiting it only to their own computers and specifically<br />
to their mini computers, not even the big mainframes, it really<br />
limited the spread of Focal. In fact, it forced me to go out to the<br />
developers and people in educational institutions they wanted<br />
Basic.<br />
There were few schools and colleges in Boston area, near DEC that<br />
were OK with Focal. But stuff was getting published by Minnesota<br />
Educational Computer Consortium and others in Basic, [inaudible<br />
00:43:32] computer project. So they wanted Basic. [laughs] I had to<br />
go on. I hired one group, actually it turned out to be just an<br />
individual guy in Brooklyn that developed a Basic for 4KPDP8. Well<br />
Basic took 3.5K, I gave you 500 words, 512 bit not even the 16 bit,<br />
at least get 2 bits per...but 500 words the right programs. Wasn't<br />
much.<br />
<br />
So that forced Lunar Lander and [inaudible 00:44:15] and some of<br />
those programs actually. Some of them I imported over from Focal<br />
into Basic. And then we had a machine that had 8K. We had a<br />
different version of Basic because Hewlett Packard had a machine<br />
that read cards, mark sense cards. We had to have a different<br />
version of basic for that. Then we had a timeshare Basic. We had<br />
six versions of Basic, five actually on the PDP8 family. It was<br />
absurd, it was crazy, but we had to do it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I was going to ask you, the process of like...you started<br />
saying...you interrupted yourself. You said, "People would submit<br />
articles and then..." I don't know what you were going to say next.<br />
But [inaudible 00:45:08] that I wanted to ask you like just the<br />
process of how the magazine got made. You got an article was,<br />
somebody just typed up or something and...<br />
<br />
Betsy: You mean the mechanics of the production?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We can receive most of the articles for the magazine came over the<br />
transom. And we would get these articles and our editorial system<br />
would log them in and pass them around to editorial staff. John<br />
Anderson and Russell [inaudible 00:45:42] .<br />
<br />
David: Peter Fee.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Peter Fee.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What does it mean over the transom?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Means they weren't solicited. Somebody in the middle of the night<br />
jumped to know [laughs] or through the mailbox. We put a little<br />
piece of paper on there and the guys would write their opinions.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] That is serious.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Some of the things they said. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Like what? What would they say?<br />
<br />
Betsy: "Don't quit your day job." [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: And then they had the rubber stamp.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Somebody found a stamp. Everything that we had was used, including<br />
our desk and everything. And somebody found, at the back of the<br />
desk, a stamp. It said San Marcos on it. This was like the ultimate<br />
insult. [laughs] San Marcos, like you know, "Get out of here."<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Send it to San Marcos?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Send it to San Marcos, wherever that was. Ultimately, I would make<br />
the final decision whether we were going to publish this or not.<br />
Once we were well established, the vast majority of them went back.<br />
We never returned manuscripts. And they would come with piles of<br />
code. A lot of them were programs and, we would decide and the<br />
editorial assistants job to notify the person. Then we bought all<br />
rights, didn't we?<br />
<br />
David: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
Betsy: North American Serial rights, that's what we bought for everything.<br />
Then they would go into a cube. Sometimes we would say something,<br />
"Oh, this is going to go really well with this educational<br />
institute that we're doing in June," Like that one is for June or<br />
just put it in the queue and we will see when it comes or rises to<br />
the top or whatever.<br />
The more technical editors like, John Anderson, he was our best guy<br />
ever. They would go through the code and make sure the code worked,<br />
and I would edit them for content and correct them.<br />
<br />
David: For English and Grammar.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, with a pen and pencil. Then they would go to our typesetter.<br />
Typesetter would correct them. And then they would come back, and I<br />
think, our lower level editorial assistant would proofread them,<br />
but proofread a lot of them too. When they came out typesetter, it<br />
was on a smooth shiny paper.<br />
<br />
David: Photographic paper.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And then, if they had screenshots or anything the art department<br />
would make them into photo stats or [inaudible 00:49:02] . And then<br />
when it was time for them to go to press they would put them on<br />
boards, pieces of cardboard, white paper...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So you paste up?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, they do the paste up and put it on there.<br />
<br />
David: The boards were using non reproducing blue on its photograph. They<br />
had different outlines, blue defined columns, both two and three<br />
column pages and upper limits and page numbers and all that kind of<br />
stuff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: We were still doing it on [inaudible 00:49:43] newspaper in 1990.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well that's exactly it, so you know what we're talking about. And<br />
then once you get it all together and then again somebody has got<br />
to read it to make sure there is no lines left out, particularly of<br />
the programs. Make sure that those all still make sense. There were<br />
many cases where line got left out or artists cuts off a things and<br />
realizes, "Oh, I mean to cut it short." And that whole line<br />
disappears and then you send it off to be printed and all the<br />
subscribers get a little upset because Startrek doesn't run.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: So that sort of thing happened frequently or often?<br />
<br />
David: With typeset material, not much at all. But with program listings,<br />
program listings were really tough. Because you would have people<br />
that would submit something, and they'd have a really cheap, low-<br />
end dot matrix printer. And we always encouraged people, if you're<br />
going to submit a program, submit it in some machine-readable form.<br />
So we don't want to type them all in to make sure they work. Even<br />
though our readers are going to have to, but we don't want to have<br />
to do that. So send us. But even so, we might then print it off on<br />
one of our slightly higher end printers. But I'll tell you what,<br />
you have page breaks and everything else. And the Art department<br />
didn't have a clue about programs and stuff. The program would get<br />
stated down. We weren't using the full sized type for program<br />
listings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. At that point we hadn't the ability to make them fit.<br />
<br />
David: That's where the most common place that you'd lose a line or<br />
something. It would get photographed, and when it's coming out of a<br />
line printer, you might have one or two lines on the following<br />
page. "Oh, we forgot that."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Personally, I know it said so much about magazine that when it<br />
continued, there were just sometimes a handwritten area going,<br />
"Continued over here." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Oh, absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was a early.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It wasn't professional, and that was awesome. It was just like,<br />
"OK."<br />
<br />
Betsy: Then what we would do, we would request when we...we would solicit<br />
articles. Like if there was a new Apple peripheral that we wanted<br />
to review, we'd get the product. Then a lot of times, our own guys<br />
wanted to review the stuff, but if it was something that we didn't<br />
have time for, or that was better suited to one of our freelancers,<br />
we would send it out and ask for a review of it.<br />
A lot of reviews came in over the transom too, but we tried to be<br />
careful of those, that they were not either trying to justify their<br />
own purchase of whatever it was or get even with the publisher for<br />
producing it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Or written by the... [crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: That really wasn't an issue at the time, it was a more innocent<br />
time. That really didn't happen much, but it was, sometimes, people<br />
would get a product they didn't care for and totally bash it, then<br />
we have to go and figure out is it really that bad. We tend to not<br />
produce seriously negative...if it was a really bad product we just<br />
ignored it.<br />
<br />
David: We tried to be objective with reviews, but before I got into the<br />
computer field at all I was in market research. There are a number<br />
of biases, too, that really overwhelmingly affect all kinds of<br />
market research polls or surveys. One is that people think they're<br />
better than they are. For example, if we were doing a poll or a<br />
research study, we'd put a question on basically designed to show<br />
the executives who were using this data that there were some<br />
biases.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He's not talking about Creative Computing.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: No, no. This was way earlier. I'm talking about Proctor and Gamble<br />
products or general foods or that kind of thing. Anyways, the<br />
question we put on was "please rank your driving ability," and we<br />
had from well below average, accident waiting to happen up to Mario<br />
Andretti, Danica Patrick, over there. And you know what, 99 percent<br />
of the population ranked themselves better than the average. Where<br />
is your average then? Its way high.<br />
The other thing, equally pervasive in a sense, is that people<br />
wanted to justify a decision, a purchase decision. In fact, back<br />
the 30s, the slogan for Ford Motor Company was ask a man that owns<br />
one. You ask a man that owns and has made a decision to buy this<br />
car, he's going to say "Yeah, it is the greatest car." So you put<br />
on questions, again, throwaway questions.<br />
<br />
If you had this, or if you were an owner of whatever car it is that<br />
you have. "What do you have now? Would you buy another one?" People<br />
"Oh, yes. This is a great decision. I love this car." I'll tell you<br />
where you can find out, is you look at what percentage of people<br />
that did own that particular car did buy another one? They're<br />
always way lower than they those that say they would buy another<br />
one. It gets more pronounced with higher prices.<br />
<br />
If you've made a decision to buy a high-priced car, you're going to<br />
think, "I'll tell you what. This Land Rover was the best car I have<br />
ever bought." 78 percent of people might say, "I'm going to buy<br />
another one." About 15 percent of the people actually do.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So [inaudible 00:56:49] magazine because people want to justify a<br />
review.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. That's exactly right. And as Betsy said, it could go the<br />
other way, too. "I think I'm getting screwed here with this product<br />
and I'm going to knock it." When you get reviews, in essence, over<br />
the transom, they're either justifying, "This was really wonderful.<br />
I made a great decision buying this particular product," or "I hate<br />
it." It's hard to know whether the review was really objective and<br />
realistic.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you ever push-back from advertisers?<br />
<br />
David: All the time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Can you tell me?<br />
<br />
Betsy: We would feel the pushback from our ad sales people. They would say<br />
"So and so is annoyed with you because you didn't put it." We very<br />
rarely put anybody's totally negative reviews, but we tried to be<br />
objective, and not every product is perfect. Almost every product<br />
is going to have some negative feature.<br />
We would put those in and the advertisers would then go to their ad<br />
rep and complain. Then the ad rep would come to us and say, "Why<br />
are you doing this? These people are mad. I have to sell them ads."<br />
We would just say "Separation of church and State. You are<br />
advertising in this magazine because it's a credible magazine, and<br />
if we let you push us around, it won't be credible anymore, and<br />
then it will reflect on your ad."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you remember anyone ever pulling ads [inaudible 00:58:39] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't, offhand. Do you?<br />
<br />
David: No, but I can tell you the opposite. There were a couple of<br />
magazines that almost ran manufactured press releases as product<br />
reviews. They did get more advertising than we did from some<br />
manufacturers that liked that. I hate to name names, but Compute<br />
Magazine. I don't think you'll find any negative reviews in Compute<br />
Magazine. Everything was the greatest thing since sliced bread.<br />
Personal Computing, similar, very positive. "Gee whiz" reviews on<br />
almost all the things that they saw. It just isn't that way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You have talked about [inaudible 00:59:49] . We've talked briefly<br />
at least about the other magazines. Sync, the one about Timex<br />
Sinclair. I understand the allure of publishing a magazine geared<br />
to a specific system, but why did you pick Timex Sinclair? [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Probably two reasons. One is that we had more of a presence in<br />
England than most of the other magazines.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Still do.<br />
<br />
David: We had a very early agreement with David Tebbet, who was the co-<br />
publisher of Personal Computer, something-or-other. It might have<br />
been Personal Computer World. Yes, it was.<br />
<br />
Betsy Ahi: Yes it was Personal Computer World, and when PC world started they<br />
had to call it PC World because there was already a Personal<br />
Computer World in England.<br />
<br />
David: And we had an agreement that they would reprint materials from<br />
Creative Computing, which they did for a while but then they<br />
developed their own in-house capabilities and there was enough<br />
differences. We went to England and very early on had an agent in<br />
England that we could take subscriptions.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A housewife who kept her dark issues in her spare bathroom.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we still know her. Hazel Greaves, Hazy. Anyway, so we were<br />
getting enough subscriptions from England. We were sending over, I<br />
don't know how they packaged them up, but they call them Mbags, M-<br />
bags, mail bags basically of magazines, then we mail them from<br />
England. So I had more of our connection with British market than<br />
probably any of the other magazines, we definitely did.<br />
And so I get to know Clarkson Clair and what's going on over there.<br />
And then when they bring over the computer to this country and<br />
Timex, my God, big outfit. They were going to market it. By that<br />
time you know, there was no point starting a [inaudible 01:02:25]<br />
magazine or an entire magazine. They were, Or Apple, they were<br />
already existed. So maybe this is going to be the next big one. We<br />
will be right there when they start and we were.<br />
<br />
Timex actually put, what we had simple, simple sink or something<br />
but it was in the package with the computer. So that was one way of<br />
getting our subscriber base and we couldn't possibly afford to<br />
advertise and do direct mailings for magazine like that. But they<br />
were in essence helping us go on. So that's why it is pretty<br />
successful actually. Often, we were making money on the magazine<br />
mainly because we didn't have to promote it.<br />
<br />
If we had to get subscriptions, we could not have possibly made it<br />
work. There wasn't enough advertising really. I don't know what the<br />
issue here was, but it was not as good as we would have liked it.<br />
The magazine would have been tiny if we maintained the same<br />
advertising to edit ratio we would have liked. But we didn't lose<br />
money out of it but we didn't make anything out of it either. I<br />
think it was a breakeven proposition.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Microsystems. [inaudible 01:04:09] .<br />
<br />
David: I said there was a lot of early development in New Jersey and there<br />
was a guy named Saul Libes, you will find him probably, [laughs]<br />
who was the first president of the Amature Computer Group in New<br />
Jersey. He was a Professor at [inaudible 01:04:43] College and he<br />
felt that Byte magazine started out fine but then they were<br />
focusing more on assembled hardware and things that were already<br />
made.<br />
So he wanted to get down on really lower level of do it yourself,<br />
build it yourself. Microsystems was more like Byte was in the very<br />
beginning, focusing on circuit diagram, this was logic in PC's and<br />
everything.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There first name was S100, Microsystems<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, S100 perhaps then it became Microsystems in '78 or '79. When<br />
some of the others came out they started [inaudible 01:05:45] 6800<br />
and 68,000 chips from Motorola. But I would say it was a really<br />
techy magazine and it was one that I think probably killed that one<br />
off.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was dead before [inaudible 01:06:05] . [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: It might have been. I don't know, but it was...<br />
<br />
Betsy: S100 bus did not survive and to the [inaudible 01:06:12] .<br />
<br />
David: It was dead before as there was these eras and the do it yourself<br />
S100 era,that was '75 to '78. Then it kind of had a downward spiral<br />
of two or three years and it was gone. Well, maybe it wasn't gone<br />
but it wasn't the same. And so Microsystems was tuned into that and<br />
they were running hardcore stuff.<br />
And the reason that Saul...we reach an agreement with him to<br />
publish it, is basically he didn't have any real magazine<br />
background. We thought we could do something with it. It turned out<br />
not to be a good fit bit we published it for a while. I don't know<br />
if we made money or lost money on that. Probably it didn't make<br />
anything. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Small business computers or computing.<br />
<br />
David: What?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Small business computers? Who do we buy that from? I can't even<br />
remember. You can't even remember that we had it, I can tell by the<br />
look on your face<br />
<br />
David: I can<br />
<br />
Betsy: That one of my brothers...my brother was a publisher remember?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I don't know who or where we got it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That just fall into grave or...?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Eventually, but that we post it for a while. I think is something<br />
that somebody basically left on our door step.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think it was kind of like a puppy on the... [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: I think it came with your brother.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, because my brother wasn't into publishing until after clearing<br />
college.<br />
<br />
David: It sounded like a good idea at the time.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think we saw a future in business computing<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we did and unfortunately that was one word as if they just<br />
want...I mentioned yesterday that they wanted to really shift the<br />
focus of Creative Computing away from home and broaden out and<br />
shifted into the small business market. And just did not, it was an<br />
uncomfortable fit. We would've been better to have a separate<br />
magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember where we got Small Business Computing from or<br />
where it went.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know, either.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But I know that obviously it wasn't a huge acquisition.<br />
<br />
David: It was a footnote.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A footnote in the story. [laughs]<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Actually, a bigger acquisition was earlier and that was Rom<br />
Magazine. Rom was published by who?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Erik Sandberg-Diment.<br />
<br />
David: Right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: D-I-M-E-N-T.<br />
<br />
David: Connecticut. He did a nice job with the magazine, very nice job<br />
with it. Published nine issues and a little different focus than<br />
Creative but it really overlapped us very nicely. He had more<br />
graphic stuff. In fact, it was through him that I got to know<br />
George Baker and some of the people up there. The other guy that<br />
did the pixelated blocks photos. You've seen those.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The Einstein.<br />
<br />
David: [crosstalk] The Lincoln with block pics.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Block pics.<br />
<br />
David: Block pics. OK, he and George Baker sort of came as a package with<br />
Rom, they knew of each other. We actually, I would say, four or<br />
five issues, ran Rom as a whole separate section and even set it on<br />
the cover of Creative Computing and Rom. Then it became evident...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think that was because he had a whole other editorial kicking<br />
around. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We bought.<br />
<br />
David: Could be. And then we would just merge it in completely, but that<br />
was a very good fit. It brought us more editorial than it did<br />
subscribers. They did not have a big subscriber base, but it was a<br />
nice marriage in a sense.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Video and Arcade Games only published I think four issues.<br />
<br />
David: Three.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Three?<br />
<br />
David: Actually, three but if you've got a hold of the third one, you're<br />
doing well. I think Ziff cut that off after two real issues got<br />
mailed out. We did a third one but it wasn't sent out to<br />
subscribers.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My website only has two issues.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. There were only two that really were distributed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So I have...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: A goal. [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, if you can get a hold of the third one. [laughter] I don't<br />
even have that. There's a same thing on Tarry-on. There were three<br />
issues of Tarry-on that I did not keep the third issue. Oh, man.<br />
Shoot me.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: But Video and Arcade Games, there were at least five or six other<br />
magazines focusing on that. Talk about magazines that were running<br />
non-objective manufacture-provided reviews, all the others were. I,<br />
maybe, convinced myself and some people at Davis that there was a<br />
need for really objective...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ziff? Did Ziff do that?<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Were we with Ziff when we did that?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah. That was a late one. So we said, let's...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Continue it through.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, that was definitely. Let's do it. But again...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not only that but it was going to be fun.<br />
<br />
David: It was going to be a lot of fun. [laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: So why did it fail?<br />
<br />
David: OK, again you got to look at the eras and what was happening.<br />
Arcade games then really were on the decline. Video arcades where<br />
you go in and pop a quarter in, because there was so much more<br />
capability in the home computers and the [inaudible 01:12:55] and<br />
the Mattel and the different home systems. They could do all now,<br />
not as much, but you get a pretty darned good game that you could<br />
take home with you and not have to pop a quarter in the slot every<br />
time you play.<br />
So arcade games were kind of on the downward spiral, so that<br />
eliminated a lot of potential advertising. We weren't going to get<br />
any advertising from Nameco and all of the producers of the arcade<br />
games, which was, "Hey, it is advertising along with..." And the<br />
other home producers of the game, there were four or five magazines<br />
already that they were pouring money into. They didn't really want<br />
another one.<br />
<br />
So it was advertising that or just lack of advertising that killed<br />
that off. We just couldn't get it. I think there was still a need<br />
for what we had sort of in a sense proposed to do of objectively<br />
reviewing games and secondly, we're telling people how to play<br />
them.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, it was strategies.<br />
<br />
David: Strategies. It was advertising that we just didn't have, couldn't<br />
get.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:14:28] Atari explored and Atari I think we've covered<br />
pretty well.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Military vehicles, which we talked about.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] Yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So the other magazines, Byte and [inaudible 01:14:45] , was it<br />
rivalry? Was it friendly competition?<br />
<br />
David: Byte, we were in bed together. Not in bed together, but we<br />
published the best of Byte. Creative Computing did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: For awhile.<br />
<br />
David: Well, just one.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. That wasn't that friendly a rivalry. It wasn't that friendly<br />
after awhile.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't friendly once they sold to McGraw Hill, and they sold<br />
early. Then everything was off. We did some joint promotions with<br />
Byte for hardware creative software. We ran the ads for each other<br />
for a short time.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's when McGraw Hill cutoff.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] In a heartbeat. No more of that.<br />
<br />
David: We felt that basically we weren't even competing for the same<br />
advertisers. Just a few, but not really. Certainly, we were not in<br />
direct competition at all with Byte. So that was just kind of all<br />
in the same place and you're going in a hardware direction, we're<br />
going on the software.<br />
When Wayne Green threw this intrigue with his wife and everything<br />
else, lost Byte Magazine. He was fit to be tied. "I'm going to kill<br />
them!" and he started Kilobyte. It wasn't killable. It was Kilobyte<br />
for I don't know how many issues.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not many.<br />
<br />
David: 1000 bytes. [laughter] and a kilobyte, it had a dual meaning there.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: That was a ferocious and very nasty. Oh, horrible rivalry. Somebody<br />
early on forced him not to use the name byte at all.<br />
<br />
Betsy: So it was byte.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: So they changed it to Kilobaud.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Which didn't mean anything.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: No.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So did you have a relationship with Wayne?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Nobody had a relationship with... [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Nobody really had a relationship. I knew him, of course. He was<br />
going his own way. Now the one area actually where we got into more<br />
competition with him than in the magazine itself, because again, he<br />
was trying to be like Byte, hardware oriented and he published 73<br />
magazines so he was basically focusing on the ham radio people, the<br />
do it yourselfers and so on. But they started a software division.<br />
It was pretty good. They had a lot of the same types of software<br />
that we did on cassette tape.<br />
In any event, we really had more of a head to head rivalry on the<br />
software than in the magazine publishing. We never really had<br />
anything to do with the magazine products or books. They also<br />
published some books but more like the magazine hardware type of<br />
thing. We weren't quite as selective, but our book publishing we<br />
did get into things that weren't in the magazine. We published<br />
books with more of a hardware orientation. We had a little broader<br />
line of books than the type of things that we had in the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I don't know if you want to open this can of worms, but you said to<br />
me in an email, "You couldn't find two people whose vision,<br />
philosophy, ethics, and view of business and life was further apart<br />
than Wayne and I." Can you elaborate on that? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was just basically unpleasant, is my take on him. I didn't know<br />
him that well but it was just sort of like he had a chip on his<br />
shoulder and was daring you to knock it off. Wouldn't you say?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You knew him before I did but by the time I arrived on the scene<br />
that was just sort of the general industry perception of him, I<br />
think. It was just stay away from him, leave him alone, he's not<br />
very nice.<br />
<br />
David: Well, one other thing, which we sort of touched on a couple of<br />
times, I'm very trusting. [laughter] Overly so, according to my ex-<br />
wife and I think there would be a couple of examples. Wayne would<br />
walk out of that door, boy, out of sight, 'you're going to do<br />
something to screw him' is what his view would be. He did not trust<br />
anybody.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] And least of all, his ex wife.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: It's the old saying, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean<br />
that somebody isn't out to get you." He thought everyone was out to<br />
get him, everybody. So we were totally philosophically different.<br />
Our ways of doing business were different. I shake hands with you,<br />
we have an agreement. You don't shake hands with Wayne.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't think his employees were ever happy either.<br />
<br />
David: Oh!<br />
<br />
Betsy: You talked to them and it shows. He didn't have like a great...<br />
<br />
David: Rapport.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well it was not. The culture of his organization I don't think was<br />
particularly, I think it was probably permeated with this lack of<br />
trust.<br />
<br />
David: Well, one thing, we had fun. We really did have fun at Creative<br />
Computing. Perhaps some of the editorial staff, too much. There was<br />
one point where Betsy had to away their...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well they were all young guys. Some of them even still in high<br />
school, they would play games for hours and hours and hours, long<br />
after the reviews were done. It was one, self-contained thing that<br />
played football, and they played it for hours. I had to take it<br />
away from them. Like "don't make me be your mother"<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there any drug culture at all? If you read [inaudible 01:22:17]<br />
and he was cocaine and high everyday and popped...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not that we knew of. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: The East coast was quite different.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No there was nothing, really. I don't think so. In fact, my client<br />
John Anderson and Peter Fee, they were actually kind of protective<br />
of me in a lot of ways. I can remember being in John's office and<br />
they were talking about a movie or something like that. John said,<br />
"No, you wouldn't like this movie, don't go to this movie." That<br />
kind of thing, they were funny guys. They just kept laughing. David<br />
Lubar. They were free spirits but they were very funny, talented<br />
guys.<br />
<br />
David: He is coming out with a line of children's books, weird, weird<br />
stuff. The last one, something about the lawn mower weenies. He has<br />
a line of 6 or 8, and they're all little short stories. Some of<br />
them were adaptations of stuff that almost got published in<br />
Creative Computing, probably some of them did. Lubar is a funny<br />
guy. When he left and went to work for one of the video gaming<br />
companies, his first big successful game was "Worm Wars." You were<br />
like, "Worm Wars?" [laughs]<br />
Other people are fighting real serious warrior and you are fighting<br />
with worms. We just had a different kind of culture, a lot of fun.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Jonny Anderson went to work for A plus in San Francisco. He was one<br />
of the five people killed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1986.<br />
He was in a car and a piece of the building fell on the car. He was<br />
a really funny guy.<br />
<br />
David: We did not have a serious business culture.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, we had this great big room with a bunch of tables set up around<br />
the edges, in the middle. It was kind of like that, nowhere near as<br />
neat.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I will clean that up for you.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] Just tangles of wires, and we had to have one of every<br />
kind of computer so we can test all the software, and this one<br />
would be running this kind of peripheral, and it was like a young<br />
guys dream job.<br />
<br />
David: You commented yesterday about how we had a bunch of high school,<br />
not quite, but still...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I said that they were in their early 20s but they basically had the<br />
maturity of high school students, they needed a little bit of<br />
mothering. But I wasn't that myself. They were just really nice<br />
guys, we did a good job hiring those kids.<br />
<br />
David: When you talk about the Atari cultures and some of the others,<br />
where every Friday some of these companies have parties, that kind<br />
of thing. We had an annual party, a picnic. We didn't need weekly<br />
parties and stuff to let you have fun because that stuff was going<br />
on every day, not really partying but playing the games and<br />
bantering and everything else.<br />
As they say, at Washington, a real efficient business culture.<br />
Heck, I didn't work for Digital Equipment, which was still a pretty<br />
relaxed place, but AT&T which was anything but. This is as far away<br />
from that kind of corporate culture as you can get, but it worked.<br />
Didn't make a lot of money, but it worked.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:26:58]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. And I think they appreciated it because they weren't making<br />
tons of money either, but they were having a lot of fun. They<br />
enjoyed going to work, they really enjoyed it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Speaking of Kindle, I've done it but haven't told anybody yet that<br />
best of Creative Computing too is now available on Kindle. And I<br />
have been working backwards. [crosstalk] I just had it on sale.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I haven't publicized it yet for sale.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They won't let you do. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah, I think they will have two.<br />
<br />
David: Did you do that through Amazon? How do you convert is to Kindle?<br />
I scan them and then I do CRM and I use Elance or utilize some<br />
service in India that converts it back to ASCII, and then they<br />
convert it into an E-book from there. It's a lot of work, I want it<br />
done well, and I want it to be super awesome. And they just<br />
[inaudible 01:28:40] , like we were talking about before.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Outsourcing and stuff. But I can do it myself but that would take<br />
way too long. So I just try to do the quality control [inaudible<br />
01:28:49] . It's not perfect but better than nothing.<br />
<br />
David: I have reached the point where with my Dodge restoration book, that<br />
yes, many of the borders around the pictures are terrible, they're<br />
hand drawn and so on. But I'm not going to bother to re-do that, I<br />
just want take the book, get it into some sort of machine readable<br />
format, PDF or something. [inaudible 01:29:24] somebody that can...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah, I can get you off with that. We can then figure it out.<br />
<br />
David: I found one extra one that I can cut up.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That will help a lot. [inaudible 01:29:37] . If you want to sell a<br />
PDF of it, that would be up in couple of day. That's easy, but a<br />
searchable Kindle version that takes longer.<br />
<br />
David: I don't want a Kindle version because people want to print out<br />
something that they can...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Take out to the garage<br />
<br />
David: When people slide under the vehicle they have it there, "Oh, OK<br />
this is what I should be looking for."<br />
<br />
Kevin: If you scan it and upload it to Amazon, even create space from<br />
[inaudible 01:30:06] company, then there could actually be another<br />
book, that looks pretty identical to the first one. We will figure<br />
out.<br />
Do you [inaudible 01:30:23] ? But are you familiar with...?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Are there any?<br />
<br />
Kevin: There are but they are very different than Creative.<br />
<br />
David: Somebody out there said, "What did you read today?" The only<br />
magazines that I will occasionally pick up in the computer field<br />
are mostly from England, Internet magazines, well there are<br />
several, which is sort of interesting that the dominant Internet<br />
magazines come from England, but they do.<br />
If I want to do something, and I haven't lately, but I wanted to<br />
get into doing something different or interactive or something with<br />
my website. I'd pick up one of those magazines and kind of have<br />
same kind of thing that Creative used to publish. Here is a code to<br />
do it in Pearl or HTML, whatever.<br />
<br />
I converted all of my website, quite a while ago, to XHTML from old<br />
HTML. I did not like any of the programs that generate web pages,<br />
mainly because...Well, today its probably OK, but I felt that<br />
earlier on, they were very inefficient. You'd have this much code<br />
for something and XHTML would write it in five lines.<br />
<br />
My old-fashioned [inaudible 01:32:23] said, "You know what, the<br />
interpreter or compiler or whatever, has to go through a lot of<br />
that just to pick out what is going to be displayed." My web pages<br />
are very compact and short. They are all XHTML, none of that is<br />
extra [inaudible 01:32:41] style pages and everything else.<br />
<br />
Anyway, so that's what I'll pick up a magazine for. I'm was doing a<br />
little bit of programming in Pearl and then I said, "No. You know<br />
what, I can get routines that I can download and I don't have to<br />
learn it myself. I learned enough to know that I don't want your<br />
Pearl program." [laughs] Or what is the other one? I don't know.<br />
I'm right at the point now where I'm wanting to do some more things<br />
that I can't, so I'll probably purchase some more computer<br />
magazines and learn about it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Has anyone talked to you about the purchase of PC by Davis?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is a big story.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: She was involved.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was involved. There was a magazine called PC. I was in San<br />
Francisco.<br />
<br />
Kevin: PC magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: PC Magazine, right. And, there was a guy named Tony Gold and there<br />
was somebody else that I can't remember. There was Tony Gold and<br />
this Mr. X started this magazine and they hired...David Banell will<br />
probably tell you all, I don't know all the details but I'm sure he<br />
has it engraved in his brain.<br />
They hired David Banell to run it and I guess several other people,<br />
and my understanding is, that they told them they were going to<br />
give them a piece of the action, they weren't going to pay them<br />
very much but you're all part owners and everything, but nobody<br />
ever wrote it down.<br />
<br />
So when Ziff Davis approached Tony Gold and Mr. X and wanted to buy<br />
the magazine, and the guys said, "Oh yeah, sure," and they sold it<br />
to him and all these people that were working for them said, "Well,<br />
what about us. We're part owners too." But there was no proof of<br />
it. So Ziff bought it, and they were right in the middle, just<br />
about to go to press with an issue and they got word that it had<br />
been purchased by Ziff.<br />
<br />
So David Banell took just about the entire staff and they walked<br />
out and went across town and started PC World. Apparently their<br />
lawyers said, "Don't take anything with you." So they just walked<br />
out and left the offices as they were, and Ziff, who now had a<br />
magazine to get out and no one to do it, sent me out to San<br />
Francisco for a couple of weeks and there was like an editorial<br />
assistant and a couple of freelance writers, were the only people<br />
left.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So this is when you became the interim.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is how I become the editorial director of PC. So I basically<br />
went out there and walked into this office and had to pull together<br />
their issue and get it off to the printer. They had a big dummy on<br />
the wall where everthing...<br />
<br />
Kevin: They lay all the...<br />
<br />
Betsy: They lay all the impositions where all the pages and the stories<br />
were going to go and they moved everything around. [laughs] But<br />
they couldn't resist.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That is awesome.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This one guy, whose name I wish I could remember. Barry Owen,<br />
worked with me, and we were able to get it off to the printer and<br />
then pack everything up and send it back to New York and then they<br />
hired Barry Owen, he moved to New York and he eventually become the<br />
editor, because that was who they had.<br />
I was sort of the editorial director for a while and they said<br />
that, "If you were going to do this, you would have to come to the<br />
city. We are going to really set up an office here and make it<br />
real." And I said, "No, I am not going to drive into the city every<br />
day or take the train or the bus or anything." It was a interesting<br />
story and we were getting much more interesting version of it from<br />
David Barnell, who was there. [laughs]<br />
<br />
And in the mean time, they were all starting up PC World and taking<br />
all of their freelancers and trying to make it as difficult as<br />
possible for PC. That was a big rivalry, obviously.<br />
<br />
David: And then it created a couple of months of problems at creative too,<br />
because my editor was gone. I had really gotten very dependent to<br />
rely on her for so many things. "I got to edit this myself." And<br />
then the whole question mark was, OK if PC magazine, is she can<br />
stay with it. It was a time of uncertainty.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm sure it was a bad career move.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. But PC magazine still exist.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, exactly. I don't know if I would have existed if I had to<br />
commute to New York, that's a nasty commute. Millions of people do<br />
it but, I just didn't want to be one of them. I didn't mean to<br />
interrupt, so back to you.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What are you most proud of, or everything you have done?<br />
<br />
David: OK, that's obviously not a one word answer. Proud is, I am not<br />
crazy about it. I guess the fact that I continued to hear from<br />
people that said, "Hey, I got my start in computing from Basic<br />
computer games or Creative Computing," or something that I had my<br />
hand in, that makes me feel pretty good.<br />
You have a long term, or longer term influence that just what you<br />
do at the time, it's living on. It's not living on forever. Basic<br />
isn't going to live on forever. But I think the idea that having<br />
some positive influence on other people, on their lives, on their<br />
careers, that's a good.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You helped send people into the computer science field.<br />
<br />
David: And you know the specific individual accomplishments. Yeah, I wrote<br />
a couple of programs that are probably in some cases, maybe not the<br />
program but the routines, are still in use. That's minor compared<br />
to having an influence on people and their career and their<br />
outlook, their future. That's way more important. "OK so I wrote a<br />
great algorithm, so what."<br />
<br />
Kevin: And you really think it's the same algorithm that's being used in<br />
Google maps and...<br />
<br />
David: Portions of it, yeah. But that is minor. I look back and I say,<br />
"Almost anything that I wrote in the last 30-40 years, if I were<br />
doing it today, I would have done it a little differently, but I<br />
didn't know then what I know now." So there's no one thing I could<br />
say, "Oh, that was a really great article, or great insight," or<br />
something. Anything can be improved upon.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sure. That's what disappoints me about computer magazines today is<br />
I don't think that it seems like children going to be able to go.<br />
It's not going to motivate anybody to do anything, other than use<br />
Word version 18 or whatever. There's no Basic programs to type<br />
anymore and it's not exciting.<br />
[cross talk]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Well, [inaudible 01:42:31] was mentioning that at breakfast,<br />
oh gosh that was just yesterday.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was yesterday [laughs] .<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] That kids today don't have any feeling about, or I should<br />
say knowledge about the real basics of bits. What is a bit?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: Nobody knows anymore. He wanted to find some little simple piece of<br />
hardware. Really, I guess he has, that every kid when they're in<br />
the 5th or 6th grade will be exposed to this so they'll have some<br />
concept of what bits are all about. Are you ever going to get that<br />
into schools today? No. So anyway, it's just kind of, hopefully<br />
there's been some long term influence.<br />
And what I'm doing now even, which is mainly developing bible<br />
studies for...well, I mostly have guys that have had a drug or<br />
alcohol addiction problem coming to this. They're in a rescue<br />
mission. I'm hoping that these studies can have a little bit of an<br />
influence on the direction of their lives. They're a positive<br />
influence on where they go from here. So it's kind of, people more<br />
than a specific thing or whatever.<br />
<br />
[pause]<br />
<br />
Those are terrible copies.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They are copies. These are from the scans. I was printing scans and<br />
I wasn't trying to make them pretty. Just for my reasons, it was<br />
quick and dirty. I could've bumped the contrast and stuff.<br />
<br />
David: There's Carl.<br />
[pause]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do have anything left, like how many subscribers you had over time?<br />
Is that data around anymore? How many newsstand copies you had? I<br />
assume that is a lot.<br />
<br />
David: OK, maximum, I think we mentioned that. We hit just about a half a<br />
million before Ziff killed it. Then, they gave people a choice of<br />
three magazines that they expected to continue to publish, PC,<br />
Apple's A+, or Mac User.<br />
I'm guessing that most people went with PC. One of the reasons<br />
actually was Ziff's rationale at that point was, PC World had<br />
really grown a lot and the circulation base of PC World and PC were<br />
very close. They were both about a half million. PC might have had<br />
a small lead.<br />
<br />
Then, by killing Creative Computing and rolling all of those<br />
subscribers, there was some overlap. Certainly, there were some<br />
subscribers that got both magazines. You probably had a quarter of<br />
a million additional subscribers into PC. All of the sudden, they<br />
go to advertise, "We've got three-quarters of a million and PC<br />
World only has half a million."<br />
<br />
That was when PC had a huge growth spurt. You know, they started<br />
publishing those telephone-book-thick issues.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I would think that it probably still holds the record for the<br />
largest magazine ever published, whenever the issue was that they<br />
published it, it was their biggest one. Certainly magazines aren't<br />
getting bigger now. They didn't continue to increase in size after<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: Then they started publishing it twice a month. The nudge that the<br />
subscriber base at Creative, gave to PC really, separated them<br />
completely from PC World. They had their reasons.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. This is a chart of the page count of Creative Computing over<br />
its life. It's not a question, I just made a chart. Every December<br />
there's a peak for the big December issue. Right at the end it<br />
just, all of the sudden, stopped.<br />
<br />
David: Well, that's when Ziff had decided to kill it, which was almost a<br />
year before. They basically let us publish for another eight or<br />
nine months after they had made the decision.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was a lot of back and forth. Are they going to kill it? Are<br />
they not going to kill it?<br />
<br />
David: They weren't promoting, no subscription promotion. They were saving<br />
their money. If you don't promote the subscriptions, you're not<br />
going to get them.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is page count.<br />
<br />
David: It was advertising.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:48:59]<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't actually subscriber base didn't drop them. That's cool.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just thought I'd do a comparison, even though that's not really<br />
what I'm doing here. In the beginning, you guys were bimonthly and<br />
they were monthly. I couldn't know how to do it accurately. Their<br />
page count's actually higher, because they were doing twice as<br />
much. I don't have all the data here. You guys tended to publish<br />
larger issues than "Kilobyte?"<br />
<br />
David: It was so dependent upon advertising. You got some magazines, they<br />
would run 80, 90 percent advertising, if they could. In some<br />
special interest fields, you can get away with that, because people<br />
are actually buying the magazine for the advertising, not for the<br />
editorial content.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [inaudible 01:50:02] , a good example.<br />
<br />
David: That's exactly right. Even what the guys that bought Military<br />
Vehicles, they just went over so heavily to...I always believe that<br />
you should have at least one-third editorial content, preferably<br />
more. They dropped down to 20 percent to edit.<br />
<br />
Kevin: There was one issue, the 10th anniversary issue, I don't mean to be<br />
picking on Wayne here. There was this quote he happened to say,<br />
which I thought was really interesting to me, I wanted to get your<br />
take on it. He said, this is in 1984, "A computer system doesn't<br />
really stand a prayer anymore unless there's at least one<br />
dedicated, independent magazine for its users."<br />
<br />
David: Wayne said that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wayne said that. Is that true? At the time, would you have agreed<br />
with that?<br />
<br />
David: In '84? Again, you've got to look at where we were in the cycle at<br />
that point. The cycle was then, there were more computers dying off<br />
than there were new ones being released. Standardization had come<br />
in really. You've got the IBM PC, and everybody's producing a PC<br />
clone. Apple kept going, and Atari, and Commodore attempted to.<br />
If you were to start a computer company at that point, with a new<br />
computer, yeah, you'd need something to give your user base<br />
something to do with it, more than just what the manufacturer was<br />
selling. So, that's probably accurate. What do you think?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, I think it's accurate. That's what people started to expect.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. Another chord of the same issue which we've kind of touched<br />
on from Tom Dwyer. This is in 1984. He's saying, "Computer<br />
magazines used to have personality [laughter] and now they don't."<br />
Now, they really don't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They really don't!<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think they still have personality in form but now it's just<br />
inconsistent.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Who was Tom Dwyer? I don't remember him.<br />
<br />
David: Tom Dwyer? He was at University of Pittsburgh. He came up with all<br />
those neat applications. He and Margo...He had the best basic<br />
primer of anybody, in fact the only one that both Kemeny and Kurtz<br />
endorsed outside of their own material. He had really written some<br />
good Basic books.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm just finishing up here. The Internet says you were born in<br />
1939. Is that right?<br />
<br />
David: Yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Where were you born?<br />
<br />
David: New York, New York.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent.<br />
<br />
David: I was born in the hospital that my father had a hand in designing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Really?<br />
<br />
David: He was an architect up until the Recession. I think he, perhaps,<br />
designed the restrooms but he wasn't the...<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: When were you two married?<br />
<br />
Betsy: 1988. 25 years ago.<br />
<br />
David: June 18, 1988.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What's your last name now?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mine?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ahl.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I tried keeping this professional thing and it was just way too<br />
confusing, since that really wasn't my name anyway. That was my<br />
first husband's name, and then just...this is way too complicated.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My wife kept her maiden name and now she wishes she hadn't. It's<br />
just confusing. It just made sense to do.<br />
<br />
Betsy: If had been my maiden name, I might have, but it really wasn't.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What haven't I asked you that I should have?<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] We kind of were noodling it around last night and said,<br />
"Man, the guy's thorough."<br />
<br />
Betsy: You the most prepared interviewer ever.<br />
<br />
David: I jotted down a couple of notes. Nope.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Got everything?<br />
<br />
David: What's your thinking? Because originally you were talking to me<br />
about covering Wayne's magazines and so on.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My original thought, when I had put no thought into it, was that it<br />
would be half about Wayne's magazine and half about Creative. First<br />
of all, after talking to him, I thought there's not enough to do<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: Did you talk to Wayne?<br />
<br />
Kevin: I talked to Wayne.<br />
<br />
David: Well that's good to know, right? Carl Helmers didn't know if Wayne<br />
was still alive.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He's still alive.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's true. We asked Carl Helmers if Wayne was still alive and he<br />
was [inaudible 01:56:06] .<br />
<br />
David: Actually, there was another guy up there that published a computer<br />
magazine. What the heck was the name of it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Who are you talking about?<br />
<br />
David: Up in New Hampshire, Peterborough. It was one of the earlier would-<br />
be competitors to Datamation. So, it was much earlier.<br />
He was absolutely totally convinced about the Kennedy assassination<br />
and published a computer analysis of all the photos and everything<br />
else. Every single issue of the magazine had this stuff. He and<br />
Wayne were on the same wavelength on that. You ask Wayne about the<br />
conspiracy. [laughs] You'll get an earful.<br />
<br />
Kevin: In answer to your question. First, it was going to be the two, and<br />
then that happened. Also my wife said, "If you're doing two, then<br />
it's going to seem like a compare and contrast thing." That's not<br />
what I want to do.<br />
Now I'm thinking that this will be a project about the earliest<br />
computer magazines, the first computer magazines. That way, I can,<br />
whatever, four or five chapters. One on Creative, and maybe Byte.<br />
I'm meeting with the editor of Byte in a couple of weeks at an<br />
event, maybe Interface Age or one of the other ones.<br />
<br />
David: If you can find Bob Jones, that would be an interesting contrast.<br />
He was Interface Age. He had a different perspective on a lot of<br />
things, and I had a lot of respect for him. He just didn't sell at<br />
the right time. Too bad. Bob Jones was a very serious, good guy.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Who were the other early people? Dr. Dobbs? I don't know what...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, Dr. Dobbs...<br />
<br />
David: Jim Warren! Oh my goodness. That would give you another perspective<br />
altogether.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's, again, the California...<br />
<br />
David: Jim Warren and Bob Albrecht are tied together very closely. They're<br />
both in sort of in the alternative lifestyle. I don't know what<br />
you'd call it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That probably had Friday afternoon pot parties. [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Oh, boy. Did they ever! Yes, yes. Jim also was the one that started<br />
the West Coast computer fairs. He's a very capable guy. Dr. Dobb's<br />
journal was in a sense, well, you've probably seen it. You have,<br />
right? OK, so you know.<br />
That's really low level programming rather than higher languages.<br />
We're talking about machine languages, assembly language,<br />
programming, and there. It was sort of like Microsystems was to<br />
Byte. Microsystems, for the really serious hardware guy. Dr. Dobbs<br />
was for the really serious programmer, compared to Creative which<br />
was for people who just wanted to type something in that would<br />
work.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:59:35] basic right. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Dr. Dobbs. That was a totally different [inaudible 01:59:43]<br />
competitor.<br />
<br />
David: We didn't compete at all. I had a view that we competed at all with<br />
them; they may have thought we did but I didn't think so.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did they even have advertising?<br />
<br />
David: Oh yeah, actually they did, and it kept going for a long time<br />
because it was a small little nitch magazine. But, yeah, Jim Warren<br />
would be an interesting guy, very interesting guy early on. I don't<br />
know about Albert because you say he published more tabloid<br />
newspapers. I don't know if they ever really published any magazine<br />
size thing or not. Probably not, but it would give me a totally<br />
different perspective because they are coming from the west coast,<br />
looser or whatever.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That sounded pretty loose.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah nothing compared to that.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think he was sort of in rebellion when he started working at<br />
Creative Computing because he was coming off of AT&T where he had to<br />
wear a suit to work every day. So the first thing he did was burn<br />
his suits and wear t-shirt and jeans way before anybody was doing<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: I went extremely in the other direction, yeah I did, but who else<br />
real early. Personal computing which I think David Barnell somehow<br />
involved in it at some point in there. Because they moved from the<br />
west coast to New Jersey, they were bought by...who was that? It<br />
was mostly a company that published things like hardware age and<br />
advertiser-driven magazines. What was the name?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, gosh. Begins with an 'H'.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Halshep<br />
<br />
David: No. Anyway, when they brought personal computing...I think Barnell<br />
maybe even started it, and then they moved it to New Jersey, and<br />
then David said "I'm not going to New Jersey. I'm a west coast<br />
guy," or whatever. And then, they changed the whole thing totally.<br />
That's why I said they're one of the ones where they were so<br />
totally advertiser driven. A press release is a product review, as<br />
far as they were concerned.<br />
They had some interesting stuff. They were a competitor only in<br />
name, but also because they got the advertising. "I think I'm going<br />
to advertise." "Oh! We're going to publish a wonderful review! Give<br />
it to us." And so they were early, and they made money. There were<br />
a bunch of flash-in-the-pan magazines that lasted 2 or 3 or maybe 6<br />
issues, but nobody...<br />
<br />
Kevin: But only one in seven made it, so...<br />
<br />
Betsy: One in seven, right?<br />
<br />
David: That's right, exactly. I can't remember the name of some of these<br />
ones, but there was a very successful big magazine that published<br />
all Apple...reviews of Apple stuff. What was that one? Apple by<br />
themselves spawned I'd guess half a dozen magazines.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Inquest, and Insider, and Apple...a bunch of others there.<br />
<br />
David: Right. Actually, there's one that I can't think of the name of, it<br />
turned out, it was bigger and thicker and creative. They were<br />
publishing a lot of stuff, but again, it would all be positive and<br />
so they really killed us on getting advertising. We had been a<br />
publisher of Apple material for a while. Then all these others came<br />
along. That one, whatever it was, was really took a lot of<br />
advertising from us. I'll think about it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You'll remember.<br />
<br />
David: I'll remember some of this. When it all settled out, you came back<br />
down to eight or nine, but the ones we're talking about...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Well, at one point there was 200.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I think that's correct.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You are probably counting newsletters..<br />
<br />
Kevin: Probably industry-specific stuff and niche stuff but still, you<br />
went from one to 200, 10 years ago.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. That's true.</div>Mauryhttps://www.computingpioneers.com/index.php?title=Dave_Ahl_and_Betsy_Ahl&diff=143Dave Ahl and Betsy Ahl2019-09-25T18:24:13Z<p>Maury: sp</p>
<hr />
<div>This is a transcript of an audio interview. This transcript may contain errors - if you're using this material for research, etc. please verify with the original recorded interview.<br />
<br />
Source: ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast<br />
<br />
Source URL: http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-280-david-and-betsy-ahl-creative-computing-magazine<br />
<br />
Interviewer: Kevin Savetz<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm interested in how you guys got together. Was it some sort of<br />
office romance? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It started before then. I was working at Drew University and I was<br />
dating the computer science professor. He invited Dave...he was a<br />
subscriber to Creative Computing. I can remember being at his house<br />
and picking up a copy of this magazine and thinking, "Creative<br />
Computing," and laughing. "What kind of a title is that?"<br />
He invited Dave to come speak to one of his classes. While he was<br />
there, he said, "I should stop by your placement office. We're<br />
starting to expand. I'm looking for some people." Right? Am I<br />
getting this right? I was looking for other opportunities, so I<br />
sent him my resume. Many months later, he hired me.<br />
<br />
David: She still smarts about that.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: I interviewed her in, I don't know, April or so.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You interviewed me on April 17th and you did not hire me until<br />
August 1st. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: A lot was going on that year. That was '78.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was a really long time after that that we got married. We didn't<br />
get married until 10 years later.<br />
<br />
David: Actually, I had hired Betsy as our business manager. That's what I<br />
really needed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Not a wife, then.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not wife then, either.<br />
<br />
David: Not at that point. We had 2 buildings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had one.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, well I was looking for...<br />
<br />
Betsy: My first job was to find another building.<br />
<br />
David: We were expanding like crazy. In fact, one of the reasons that I<br />
didn't hire her sooner, I had just left my day job at AT&T, and was<br />
facing up to, "Oh my gosh, can I afford to take a salary out of<br />
Creative Computing?" Yes, we had expanded a lot, but can I even pay<br />
myself, much less other senior people? I left AT&T in July, and<br />
finally by August it became clear I really have to get this<br />
administration end of things under control.<br />
The editorial was OK. I had enough outside contributors that were<br />
going along with what we were doing in-house that I could continue<br />
with that, but it was the other end of things where we really had<br />
some problems. So then we go to 2 separate facilities. One was a 2<br />
family house on the other side of Morristown, and the other was a<br />
converted greenhouse garage, which is where I started. So, Betsy<br />
was in the greenhouse garage where I had the administration side of<br />
things, and I was at the house and that was the editorial and art<br />
and...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Software.<br />
<br />
David: ...putting the magazine together. Software, right. So she would<br />
come over from her place to my office every day or two just to let<br />
me know what's going on, and we'd get together. But it wasn't until<br />
I don't' remember the date when Betsy was saying, "Well, I'd like<br />
to get into..."<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well I had spent all my summers in college and two thereafter<br />
working at our local newspaper, writing editing and putting the<br />
whole thing together, so I think I more or less just said, "We've<br />
got all these new product announcements that we don't have anybody<br />
to do, why don't I just do them?" So, I started out doing the press<br />
releases and things.<br />
<br />
David: Her newspaper experience was first in high school covering sports.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, I started out covering the unpopular sports as a senior in<br />
high school. Because they didn't want a girl to write about the<br />
important sports. So they let the girl write about the unimportant<br />
sports, which turned out to be the winning sports, at this small<br />
New Jersey high school. That's how I started.<br />
<br />
David: And then at the newspaper, you started by writing obituaries,<br />
right?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well, it's one of the things I did. I always wanted to be a Spanish<br />
teacher. I didn't know anything about this. So, I got this sports-<br />
writing job by way of a babysitting job, I babysat for the<br />
publisher's kids and on the way home one night he said to me, "We<br />
always have a boy from the school who writes about the sports for<br />
the paper, do you know anybody?" and I said, "Well, I know the guy<br />
who did it last year, and if he could do it, I could do it."<br />
So I did that and didn't' think much more of it. Went off to<br />
college, came back over spring break, and ran into the guy in the<br />
grocery store and he said, "Would you like a job working for the<br />
paper this summer?" And I said sure. I had no idea whether he<br />
wanted me to sweep the floors or what, but it was a job so I took<br />
it. It was in the editorial department.<br />
<br />
And I learned from some very serious journalists who had worked for<br />
a very good paper, the Newark Evening News, which was a very<br />
serious paper that probably was too serious and folded, probably in<br />
the mid '60s, but these people were really good journalists and<br />
they taught me a lot.<br />
<br />
I think it was that first year, about halfway through the summer<br />
the publisher was on vacation, the editor was going to go on<br />
vacation when the publisher came back and the publisher, the day he<br />
was supposed to come back had appendicitis, had to have an<br />
appendectomy which back in those days was a much bigger deal than<br />
it is now. The editor said, "Well, I'm leaving." [laughs] And there<br />
I was. I was running this little paper.<br />
<br />
David: So I figured if you can run a newspaper, even though it's just a<br />
summer job, she could do a lot for us. Well, Betsy continued to<br />
handle the administrative things for really quite awhile and, as<br />
she said, probably was initially doing new product releases. Cause<br />
you get just tons of it over the transom and from these smaller<br />
companies...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So you'd like get a press release and then you'd rewrite it, that<br />
sort of things?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well we had a new product section and it was a format, a style for<br />
them, for each one. If they sent a photo, do a photo, a cut line<br />
for it. Basically what I do is let them pile up and then sort<br />
through and figure out which ones were worthy of attention. And<br />
then it was kind of just filler. They ran in one column and when<br />
you came to the end of the magazine whatever you had leftover you<br />
would fill in with these.<br />
<br />
David: And the thing is that the companies that were putting out these<br />
press releases, this was back in the, what '76, '77 or so, tiny<br />
little companies. They had no marketing expertise so they were<br />
sending us, in some cases, not quite handwritten but pretty crude.<br />
So it took some editing and some real work to make them readable.<br />
And then, as Betsy said, you had to guess. OK, which one, this is a<br />
significant product but is this guy going to be able to make this<br />
company go or is it just going to flop? And we tried to be<br />
responsible to the readers. Reporting on things that weren't just a<br />
wonderful great new idea but something that they were going to have<br />
on the market that was going to get some support and everything<br />
else. So anyway. That was a long story of how we got together.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I still don't know how you got together.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We were working in an office about as large as this banquette here<br />
together. Because when we first started working together we didn't<br />
have this other house. So it was the two of us. You had an actual<br />
desk I believe. I had a table that he had made out of particle<br />
board. Yeah it was fancy and I had to put duct tape along it<br />
because the edge was making holes in my clothes.<br />
So we worked in this office back to back, sort of got to know each<br />
other, and became friends, little by little. He said to me, when<br />
you're looking for this building, it would be a good thing if there<br />
was a place for me to live because I'm in the process of getting<br />
separated from my wife. Which it turned out you didn't do right<br />
away but eventually you did. Right?<br />
<br />
David: Well, it was three months later. That was right away in a sense.<br />
What precipitated that was we had a woman that was working in the<br />
mailroom and she got in cahoots with somebody in the accounting<br />
department and they started working a little embezzlement.<br />
<br />
Kevin: This was at the [inaudible 00:13:49] ?<br />
<br />
David: Pardon?<br />
<br />
Betsy: At Creative Computing.<br />
<br />
David: No, at Creative Computing. This was just after Betsy was hired. In<br />
fact, they had it going on before and I mean they were very good at<br />
it. What they did is they set up a bank account in the name of<br />
Creative Computing in the next county. And they would take very<br />
fourth or fifth check and it might be a subscription, it might be<br />
paying for an ad or something...<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was mostly the advertisers.<br />
<br />
David: Well it was both. And then they put that into their bank account.<br />
And then the one that was in the accounting department would mark<br />
the thing as paid.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, she didn't. That was her mistake.<br />
<br />
David: Well, she didn't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because that wasn't her job.<br />
<br />
David: Well she blew one. In any event it was my advertising manager that<br />
we had sent an overdue notice to one of the advertisers.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Apple.<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Apple. It was Regis McKenna, it was Apple's agency.<br />
<br />
David: And they said, we paid that. And a woman said, well send me proof.<br />
And they did. And we looked at the bank where it was deposited and<br />
then we called in local detective, police department. And they got<br />
the bank records and said, "How much do you think this was?" Well<br />
no they didn't say that, they said, this is probably a lot more<br />
than you thought.<br />
And it turned out to be well over $100,000. And our total annual,<br />
not even profit at that point...well, the gross was just about a<br />
million at that point, not quite, but close to it. So $100,000 was<br />
a big, big chunk 10 percent.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When was this?<br />
<br />
David: '78. And, so, obviously we fired these two. And then the court<br />
finally, they determined that they had also, one of them had been<br />
involved in welfare fraud and other stuff and the court ordered<br />
them to pay it back at the rate of, I don't know...<br />
<br />
Betsy: 47 cents a week.<br />
<br />
David: It was some tiny amount.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 00:16:26]<br />
[laughter and crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Course they'll never pay anything.<br />
<br />
David: And we got one payment you know, and that was it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And she was ordered to do public service. Like who wants someone<br />
doing public service for them who's done something like that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Magazines back then, probably any business but, they were a hotbed<br />
of intrigue. You had that happened and then the whole Bike Magazine<br />
getting stolen.<br />
<br />
David: So Betsy actually, in response to that brought, in response to the<br />
embezzlement brought in her Sister-in-Law Bobbi, and I think your<br />
mother too...<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Bobbi's mother.<br />
<br />
David: Bobbi's mother, OK. But one to...<br />
<br />
Betsy: My mother in law. I was a widow at the time.<br />
<br />
David: ...do some of the accounting because we didn't have an accountant<br />
and wanted just to help out and make some calls to advertisers and<br />
say can you speed up your payment a little bit and also calls to<br />
people that we owed money to, hey we're going to be maybe a little<br />
late. It really didn't look good. That was just a huge amount of<br />
money and so we had to stretch things out and hope that the growth<br />
continued so we could recover some of this.<br />
Betsy really rescued us there. It was amazing. We finally did<br />
stretch things out. What precipitated the separation with my wife<br />
at the time is I went home and told her this had happened and<br />
everything.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Thanksgiving weekend. Day before Thanksgiving.<br />
<br />
David: The day before Thanksgiving is when we got all the information from<br />
the police department and I went home to my wife and she said, "You<br />
dumb...," well I won't repeat the whole thing but, "You are so<br />
stupid. You trust people." "Yes, I trust people." "You shouldn't<br />
trust people like that. Get out of the house. I can't put up with<br />
this anymore." So it was a good thing we had a two family house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had this two family house.<br />
<br />
David: I moved into the bedroom on one side.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He had his office on one side of the top floor in the back bedroom<br />
and his bedroom in the back bedroom on the other side and his<br />
kitchen. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is this the place I was reading about where your bedroom was above<br />
the kitchen?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yes. The Ted Nelson.<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, a lot of things precipitated. Because of that, we had to<br />
make some other changes on personnel and move some people around. I<br />
think after that then Betsy took more of a role in the editorial<br />
end of things.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Stayed there until the bitter end.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The bitter end. Actually, I was there after he was gone.<br />
<br />
David: That's true.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ziff continued to pay me several months after they closed the<br />
magazine to stay behind and clean up because we have a 75,000<br />
square foot building. Make sure that we don't dispose of the<br />
hardware and just basically get it ready.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When you quit at the phone company to start a magazine, that must<br />
have been scary.<br />
<br />
David: I had left Digital Equipment in 1974, and I'm sure you read the<br />
whole rationale behind that, and joined AT&T in marketing,<br />
educational marketing. Same thing I was doing at DEC but obviously<br />
marketing different products to a different mix of customers. AT&T,<br />
back then and perhaps today, they had a real formula that you're in<br />
a job for two years and then they rotate you out or they put you in<br />
another job.<br />
The way AT&T works is they have certain steps. There's a manager<br />
and then a director level. There are levels, one, two, three, four,<br />
five. The operating companies, like Pacific Bell and so on, have<br />
similar steps that are considered a half step below AT&T. What they<br />
do is they rotate you out to an operating company, a half step<br />
promotion, they rotate you back into AT&T, now you're a full step.<br />
You never get a full step in one company.<br />
<br />
They had offered me a rotation to Southern Bell. Birmingham,<br />
Alabama. "No. No." Then probably two or three months later said<br />
we've got an opening in Wisconsin Tel. "Oh my gosh. Come on,<br />
something sensible." I turned them down, which was bad. You can't<br />
turn down. If you turn down three you might as well retire.<br />
<br />
The third one was, in a sense, it wasn't a promotion but it was a<br />
sideways job jump within AT&T itself. I went from having the<br />
education group, which was about eight people, to corporate<br />
communications, which is about 100 people and a huge budget. I was<br />
responsible for all of the marketing communications for the whole<br />
Bell system. Not advertising.<br />
<br />
We had seminar centers, put out all kinds of educational pamphlets,<br />
even a magazine for our customers on how to use the equipment. I<br />
was doing that. It's a big job. It's a 50 hour a week job. Creative<br />
Computing was halfway down the block. I'd go there at lunch time,<br />
see how things were doing.<br />
<br />
As I said a little bit ago, when it looked like we were going to<br />
hit a million dollars I said I've got to get serious about this.<br />
That's when I resigned from AT&T. That was probably the first, I<br />
shouldn't say the first, but that was a major problem with my wife<br />
at that time. You're leaving AT&T? You're leaving all those<br />
benefits? What are you doing, you idiot? We were on the downward<br />
spiral at that point and then the embezzlement just sealed the<br />
whole thing.<br />
<br />
Leaving any job for an unknown thing like you started a little<br />
company and you leave your day job. You're making a real<br />
commitment.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Even once you were at Creative full time, it looks like you did a<br />
lot of everything. You were writing, you were doing programming,<br />
you were being the editor, the publisher and the editor which is<br />
not done anymore.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. I don't know. You can correct me. I don't think I was a<br />
control freak.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. You had Phil Ellenberg. You had just hired Phil Ellenberg as<br />
the advertising manager. Richie was doing it. Where did he come<br />
from? He came from some respectable place. He came from some<br />
respectable place, Phil Ellenberg.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, he did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was like a real person who had a real job, not like the rest of<br />
us. He was the ad manager. I think once you made the step to leave<br />
AT&T then you mostly concentrated on the editorial. You weren't<br />
selling ads and writing and you had Steve North who was doing a lot<br />
of the editorial.<br />
<br />
David: At the beginning, yeah. The thing is I'd be lying if I said I knew<br />
how things were going to go, I knew this was going to be a huge<br />
magazine some day. I had no clue. When I started Creative Computing<br />
there weren't even personal computers at that point. I was<br />
convinced, I guess, that they would come about. I had no idea that<br />
it would be three months later that the Altair came about. It was<br />
more that I thought that an educational magazine like we had been<br />
publishing at DEC should continue.<br />
DEC had dropped off. They stopped publishing Edu when I left the<br />
education group. Well, they published an issue or two but they<br />
really weren't serious about continuing it. Then you had all of<br />
these people out here in the west coast, the Hewlett Packard<br />
computers. They were publishing some good software, they had some<br />
good arrangements with Minnesota Educational Computers Consortium<br />
and some others to distribute stuff that they developed, but there<br />
was no information source for schools and teachers and kids that<br />
were using computers.<br />
<br />
That's what I envisioned initially, but then once the Altair and<br />
the others came out people buy this kit computer and say what can I<br />
do with it? We've got these programs that will run.<br />
<br />
Betsy: First you have to steal Basic.<br />
<br />
David: What?<br />
<br />
Betsy: First you have to steal Basic.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I noticed that, I don't know what it's called, the public opinion<br />
or I don't know the word, this part here. The number one magazine<br />
of computer applications.<br />
<br />
David: That was a Davis thing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It started off first issue a non-profit magazine of educational and<br />
recreational. That was November 1970. May/June 1975 the words non-<br />
profit disappeared.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He never set it up as a non-profit.<br />
<br />
David: I did not.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You started making a profit.<br />
<br />
David: That's right. [laughs]<br />
Betsy; It was the unintentionally non-profit.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Three years later it quietly changed into the number one magazine<br />
of computer applications and software.<br />
<br />
David: That was when Ziff Davis took over.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Really? No, that was '78.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, that was '78.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, '78.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He stayed until the end.<br />
<br />
David: Right. OK. You're right. Who knows. We changed it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It seemed like a good idea at the time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's clearly a shift from education to education plus other things.<br />
<br />
David: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think it was when he realized that if you really wanted to make a<br />
profit you had to leave education behind because teachers want<br />
everything for free, or they certainly did then.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They have some websites for teachers. They still do. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Schools, teachers, yeah, they want everything for free and they get<br />
a lot for free. Places like Huntington Computer Project. There was<br />
one out here, Oregon. Yes, there was. I think it was based right<br />
here in Portland. It would have been, right, if it was in Oregon?<br />
Yes, there was a computing consortium at that time, Hewlett Packard<br />
oriented.<br />
Then you had People's Computer Company down in California that was<br />
sort of providing stuff to schools. They were mostly into<br />
alternative schools and there were a lot of them in the Bay area at<br />
that time. In fact, there was a magazine or a newspaper, big thing,<br />
I don't know how often it came out, called the "De-school Primer".<br />
<br />
It was for people that...I won't say they were hippies but<br />
basically homeschoolers but they got together and said, "We're<br />
going to educate our kids outside of the public education system<br />
but we don't want to do it individually. We'll get together." There<br />
was a big movement there and they were into computers, unlike the<br />
public schools back in '75, '76.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Homeschooling back then was very avant-garde. It was not approved.<br />
<br />
David: Not like today. The shift away from education. That, of course, was<br />
partially driven by the hardware that was then available to people<br />
at home.<br />
When I first started the magazine, I had four editors over the<br />
years, five I guess, but Steve Gray had been publishing a<br />
newsletter, what he called the "Amateur Computer Group Newsletter".<br />
It was for engineers who were scavenging up old parts from<br />
Honeywell and IBM and GE and DEC and trying to put together a<br />
computer. You've got success stories and here's how you can make<br />
this worth together.<br />
<br />
That was a long way away from an Altair, but that's what I was<br />
focusing on, people that were doing that and education. Changed our<br />
focus. You're right. Good observation.<br />
<br />
Kevin: After that, do you feel the focus changed in the next 10 years?<br />
<br />
David: The focus changed largely due to selling the magazine to Ziff<br />
Davis.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When's that?<br />
<br />
David: We were negotiating for a while and I think the sale finally went<br />
through in '83. Yeah, '83. Maybe late '82 but roughly then. They<br />
felt that you need more of a business focus, small business and<br />
people running businesses out of their home. That's where it<br />
started but then we got into real small businesses. I shouldn't say<br />
real but a store front or a small manufacturer, something like<br />
that. That's probably a direction we would not have gone. I<br />
wouldn't have gone on my own.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had a magazine called "Small Business Computing." Remember?<br />
<br />
David: That's right, we did. I would have kept Creative more targeted on<br />
the home market and still education, to some extent, but more on<br />
the home and people that were running a business, a single<br />
entrepreneur. You could review a spreadsheet or a small business<br />
computer or higher end printer or something but not lift it up to<br />
that next level up.<br />
When you're owned by somebody else and they say this is what we<br />
want to do you've got to be responsive to it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Why did you sell? Was it something that had to be done? I've read<br />
the official line.<br />
<br />
David: I think the official line is pretty close to the real line. What<br />
happened is the first magazine, maybe not the very first but the<br />
first sizable magazine, to sell was the Byte and they sold to<br />
McGraw Hill. Then there were three or four other sales. At the time<br />
there were maybe eight special interest publishers in the country.<br />
You had Hurst and CBS magazine and Ziff Davis. Maybe eight serious<br />
ones. There were some others that were, "Oh, it'd be nice if we<br />
could get into it."<br />
What happened is all of us at that point were spending maybe<br />
$100,000, $150,000 on circulation promotion. McGraw Hill says we<br />
want to get out there, we're going to spend a million dollars.<br />
They're mailing 10 times as much as we are. They're going to trade<br />
shows with big, elaborate booths and handing out all kinds of...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Free magazines.<br />
<br />
David: Not only free magazines but other stuff. That was half of it. The<br />
other half, which was probably more than half, was the advertising<br />
sales. We were using reps. We had different reps in different parts<br />
of the country, paying the rep commission on the advertising. When<br />
you are a McGraw Hill or a Hurst or a Ziff Davis you've got an in-<br />
house staff. They would have a reception at one of the computer<br />
conferences, a big deal.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We used to have a hospitality suite at the hotels in some of these<br />
conferences and then we would bring little hunks of cheese that we<br />
cut up from home and sneak the bottles of wine up the back stairway<br />
and they were having these big things with the giant balls of<br />
shrimp.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. It was just an order of magnitude different than what we<br />
could do. What happened, really, was that it got to the point where<br />
there were only three, really two, serious bidders that were still<br />
looking for a magazine and there are still about four magazines,<br />
four decent quality magazines, on the market and one was Compute,<br />
one was Interface Age. Personal Computing had just sold, there was<br />
us, and I forget who the fourth one was. There was four.<br />
<br />
Kevin: There were more magazines than buyers at this point.<br />
<br />
David: That's right. There were a lot more magazines, too, but there were<br />
four major players. One of the buyers, I didn't really regard them<br />
as serious, and that was Atari. I think they wanted to back into<br />
the thing. The two buyers left were CBS, and they had a magazine<br />
division at that time, and Ziff Davis and that was it. I said,<br />
"Man, I've got to make a deal here." That's what happened.<br />
I look back with hindsight. I said the guy, Robert I forget his<br />
last name, that owned Compute magazine, he held out. He held out<br />
until the end and he said, "I'm better than Interface Age," and he<br />
was and whatever the other one was, Family Computing, "I'm better<br />
than them." He got a really nice payoff from CBS because it was the<br />
last one and they wanted him. I don't know. If I had held off a<br />
little more would I have gotten more? Probably.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How much did you get?<br />
<br />
David: Can we publish this figure?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't know. I don't think we ever have.<br />
<br />
David: No, we never have.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's my chance for a scoop.<br />
<br />
David: Pardon?<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's my chance for a scoop.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] I'd rather not say. I can tell you Compute, if you ever<br />
read that number, which you will, it was seven times that much. It<br />
was huge. Huge. At that point, I think CBS just said we've got to<br />
get into this. We've really got to do something. The big loser was<br />
Bob Jones at Interface Age. He had a good magazine. That was a<br />
good, solid magazine. Bob Jones, he went to shows, he was always in<br />
a suit and tie. He would have fit into the corporate environment<br />
very well but he held out too long. I think he was holding out for<br />
even more.<br />
That's what I was afraid of. Less than a year later he was out of<br />
business. There was no way you could compete with these big guys.<br />
Ziff instantly started having these receptions at PC expos.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They had ad reps all over the country.<br />
<br />
David: Ad reps, yeah. Oh my gosh. We would not have survived.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Again, you [inaudible 00:41:03] .<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Not exactly right but yes. Wasn't bad. Wasn't bad.<br />
<br />
Kevin: But Ziff didn't have it for very long before they let it go. It was<br />
only a couple of years.<br />
<br />
David: It was almost four years. Three and a half years. They did a study,<br />
and this is one of the classics. I've been making a presentation at<br />
Leslie Park last year on the 10 biggest blunders in personal<br />
computing, and actually it's up to 12 now. One was, and I still<br />
feel that it was huge, is that Ziff Davis analyzed that market in<br />
'85 and determined that the home market, the market for home<br />
computers, had reached saturation. Five percent of the homes have a<br />
computer. That's it.<br />
There were three things, three major conclusions from their survey.<br />
I think probably one and a half of them were pretty good and one<br />
and a half were just absolutely wrong. The home market reaching<br />
saturation, wrong. The second one was that they said that the<br />
magazines that would be successful would be those that were focused<br />
on specific brands of computers. Are you getting all that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: With the IBM PC it really brought standardization to the industry.<br />
Their analysis was that Apple and PC were going to be the dominant<br />
players in the future and in that they were right. They said we've<br />
got to have a magazine that's just focused on those two and they<br />
did. What was their Apple magazine? They had two Apple magazines.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A+.<br />
<br />
David: But they also had the one for the Mac.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mac User.<br />
<br />
David: They had two Apple magazines and then PC. PC they spun off a whole<br />
bunch. PC Week.<br />
<br />
Betsy: PC Junior.<br />
<br />
David: A bunch of them. In any event, they were right in that. The other<br />
one that they were semi-right, in the long term future they were<br />
totally wrong but in the short term future they were probably<br />
right, and that they looked at...We had been covering bulletin<br />
board systems. CompuServe, whatever its predecessor was, basically<br />
online type of stuff.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Genie.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. They said that's just a flash in a pan, online stuff. Well, in<br />
'85 it was. It took a while. It took another 8 to 10 years for that<br />
but then oh my God. You know what's happened today. If they had<br />
stuck with Creative Computing and rather than trying to make it a<br />
small business focused magazine but kept the home and the online<br />
focus we would have owned the Internet market today, absolutely<br />
owned it. It would have been a bigger magazine than all the others<br />
put together. Hindsight is 20/20.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I know it wasn't your choice but do you have regret about that?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: At the time it was devastating.<br />
<br />
David: Absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was like someone killing your child.<br />
<br />
David: At the time, we sat in these meetings up in Stanford, Connecticut,<br />
of all places. The reason for that is Bill Ziff. What happened in<br />
the interim a year or two after they purchased Creative Computing<br />
and PC, Bill Ziff came down with cancer really big time and was<br />
afraid of dying next year. So he was moving all of his resources<br />
and the holdings outside of New York to avoid really major<br />
taxation. I'm not sure that Connecticut was much better but he was<br />
splitting them between Connecticut and Florida. Anyway, we wound up<br />
having a bunch of meetings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was trying to maintain residence in Connecticut.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I guess that was it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was living in the Crown Plaza.<br />
<br />
David: I remember the last one. We were up at the hotel.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Crown Plaza. It was Stanford, it wasn't Harvard.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, Stanford.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I said Harvard.<br />
<br />
David: When they finally came and said we're going to shut this down. That<br />
was a devastating time. We probably could have continued to work<br />
for Ziff if we had been willing to go into New York but when you<br />
get used to working a mile or two from where you live the idea of<br />
commuting into New York, who knows what the job would have been.<br />
Bye. That was it. That was, in retrospect, a mistake.<br />
The other thing that happened as a result of Bill Ziff having this<br />
bout with cancer is that Ziff Davis sold off all of their other<br />
special interest magazines. Popular Boating, Popular Photography.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yachting, Modern Bride.<br />
<br />
David: They had a big group of travel magazines. Actually, one of the<br />
things they did after Creative Computing was to shut down...we got<br />
friendly with the publisher and some of the people in the traveling<br />
division and we started doing some freelance travel writing.<br />
I was writing a monthly column for one of the travel magazines that<br />
went to travel agents on automating your travel office and so on,<br />
which was an interesting thing because there's a small business<br />
that really depended upon computers with the reservation systems<br />
and all the airlines had a different reservation system. You had to<br />
have Saber.<br />
<br />
A lot of them would go with one and make an agreement with somebody<br />
else to make their other reservations. In any event, it was a bad<br />
system and I was writing a column on how to make this work for you.<br />
As you know, I don't know how many months later we got into the<br />
Atari camp.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was your next gig?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. It was Joe Sugarman, remember, that hooked us up with Atari.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I thought it was Neil Harris.<br />
<br />
David: He was the one we worked with but it was Sugarman.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because he came from Commodore. I didn't know it was Joe Sugarman.<br />
<br />
David: He ran a company called JS&A for Joe Sugarman and Associates. They<br />
were the first one that took these full page ads in lots of<br />
different magazines and the quarter page...<br />
<br />
Betsy: The first advertorials.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, advertorial. The first print advertorials. Really serious<br />
stuff. Out of that, he spawned at least a dozen other companies.<br />
Sharper Image is a Sugarman and it's a spinoff. They've got a whole<br />
page just focused on this air ionizer or some crazy product, but he<br />
sold tons of that stuff. Then he started offering courses. He was<br />
on the verge of doing some big deal with Atari and so he knew all<br />
the people out there.<br />
I had taken his course and started running the ad. In fact, there's<br />
probably one in one of those issues that is basically a Sugarman<br />
ad. And so anyway, you took the course, too. So we got to know him.<br />
He got to know us, and we kept up. And, oh, OK. Creative Computing<br />
has folded, and I'm trying to get something going with Atari and<br />
getting their magazine really serious. And so he was the one that<br />
hooked us up with them. By the way, I'm surprised that you don't<br />
have Atari Explorer on your website<br />
<br />
Kevin: On the website? Well, the deal with my Atari magazines website is<br />
I've always strove to get permission. Atari can't be owned by the<br />
same company for more than three months at time.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's hard to get permission that way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You can't get permission. But it's out there, elsewhere. There are<br />
other archivists who don't bother to get permission. That's another<br />
good way to do things. Yeah, it's out there. I think Archive.org<br />
has it.<br />
<br />
David: Really? Yeah, because I hadn't seen it. I was looking for<br />
something...I still get inquires every once in a while from<br />
somebody that wants something in one of the previous magazines that<br />
we've published.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That's why I don't' risk it. There's a few magazine that I just<br />
absolutely would not, because it's owned by some giant monolith<br />
corporation now, and they need to hold on everything even if it's<br />
30 years old.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because someday they might be able to make money from it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right. That's why that's not there.<br />
Talk to me about...You did some weird stuff. The weird stuff I'm<br />
thinking of is the board game.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: "Computer Rage."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We just saw that. We might not have even remembered what it was it,<br />
but we saw it last night at the museum.<br />
<br />
David: They have one in the Collection's area of the Computer Museum. They<br />
didn't even know that we published it. I thought, "Look at this."<br />
<br />
Kevin: You did Computer Rage, which was weird; I want to ask you about<br />
that. You did the record album.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The record album made way more sense than the game.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, well it was a guy named Allan. He was a colonel at that time<br />
and he came to see me with the idea for the computer game.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I forgot about that.<br />
<br />
David: He was a colonel in the Army and had something to do with<br />
educational programs. The Army said people should know more about<br />
how computers work and everything else. He said, "The games that<br />
are on the market are pretty tacky and not fun. I've devised<br />
something." We worked together with him. We finally decided, "All<br />
right. We'll publish this game. By the way, he's a general and<br />
finally retired.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But he's not financing his retirement with [inaudible 00:54:29] .<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: No, not at all.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Will anyone buy this?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We did overprint.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't a big seller or big success, but we sold enough of them.<br />
Now the record was a little different. There was a guy named Dick<br />
Moberg who, at the time, was the president of the Philadelphia Area<br />
Computer Society. The first two personal computer festivals were<br />
actually in New Jersey, not the west coast. The West Coast Computer<br />
Faire came later with Jim Warren and that group. John Dilks started<br />
this computer festival in Atlantic City. This was before Atlantic<br />
City was a big casino place, but...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well, it was a casino place, but...<br />
<br />
David: ...but it was pretty tacky.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It still is.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Not like now.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not like now where it's so classy.<br />
<br />
David: In any event, they were having some issues with the hotel and the<br />
convention center in Atlantic City. Dick Moberg said, "We people in<br />
Philadelphia can do a better job than you guys in New Jersey." And<br />
he got together with what was his name? Lenny? And<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh! Saul Levis.<br />
<br />
David: Saul Levis, who was the president of the New Jersey amateur<br />
computer group. The two of them got together and said yeah, it'll<br />
be more convenient if we do a thing in Philadelphia. And Saul<br />
Levis, he had put together the first Trenton computer festival. It<br />
wasn't a big huge thing; it's gotten to be gigantic. In any event<br />
they said OK, we'll do this. At that point, this was '78; the Apple<br />
had just come out and people were making little plug-in<br />
peripherals.<br />
There was a company that...I'm not going to be able to remember who<br />
it was. They made a nice little plug-in board for the Apple. What<br />
they had was a very nice thing on the screen where you could<br />
position notes and then have them played back. So it was a visual<br />
programming of music.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Music Construction Center?<br />
<br />
Betsy: There were ads for it in magazines.<br />
<br />
David: No, it was a guy out of Denver. I don't remember. Anyway, before<br />
that everything had appeared line by line. But there were some<br />
reasonable playback systems that were starting to come on the<br />
market for the S-100 bus. There were about four of them. The<br />
programming was a little bit harrier, but nonetheless they sounded<br />
OK. And then there was still the leftovers in a sense that people<br />
that were doing work on mainframes to process music.<br />
So Dick Moberg said, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could get a number<br />
of these together?" And of course there's the Philadelphia<br />
Orchestra, we'll make it a Philadelphia Computer Music Festival! So<br />
it was largely his idea, but then, how do you publicize it? Well,<br />
you've got this magazine that's in your backyard, that was willing<br />
to recruit some people and publicize it. So we got about...I don't<br />
know at the festival there were probably 25 or 30 people that had<br />
stuff.<br />
<br />
They recorded it all, which in retrospect was a bit of a mistake<br />
because they had problems with one of the two channels in the<br />
stereo. They had the big reel-to-reel tape recorder, one of the<br />
channels was seriously too low. And then they said, "Well, we've<br />
got this wonderful tape; what are we going to do with it?" And I<br />
said, "Well, I'll do something with it."<br />
<br />
I hooked up with a studio in the city that made records, and we<br />
went in there and corrected the low channel a little bit, not<br />
totally, but enough that it sounded like stereo. And put together a<br />
vinyl record!<br />
<br />
I edited out a lot of the poor quality performances, made the<br />
record, and that sold! It sold pretty well. Our biggest problem was<br />
shipping. How do you ship a 12-inch vinyl record without it<br />
breaking? But that sold pretty well. That, of course, died off<br />
along with everything else when Creative Computing got killed by<br />
Ziff. But, I still had the original test pressing of that, the<br />
original, original.<br />
<br />
I played it back, and it sounded very good. Put it into, I forget<br />
what the software was, but, it was one, the digital routine. It<br />
would have been nice if I still had the original tape, but, I<br />
didn't. But, OK, it's got a little bit of deterioration, going to a<br />
record.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, we're not talking about losing overtones of a<br />
violin up at 15,000 hertz. It was within a narrow band, to begin<br />
with, in any event. But that did let me totally correct the left<br />
channel and bring it up to what it should be. I put that out. I'm<br />
selling CDs now, of that.<br />
<br />
In fact, a guy from Australia ordered one, and obviously, the<br />
postage to send anything overseas is a lot more. He said, "Why<br />
don't you just make MP3 files out of it?" Because, they're WAV<br />
files, the way they are now. I go, "OK."<br />
<br />
This is very recent, like within the last couple of weeks, I<br />
downloaded some software, "Convert WAV to MP3," converted it, sent<br />
them the files. They said, "That's great." What I think what I'll<br />
probably do is try to figure out how I can make them available from<br />
a website.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You've apparently forgotten that, like, 10 years ago, I did that.<br />
They're there.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. I know.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They're at vintagecomputermusic.com.<br />
<br />
David: Are they MP3s?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Well, then, I don't have to do it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You dummy.<br />
<br />
David: Bam. I did remember. I didn't know that you did them all. I thought<br />
you did a sample.<br />
<br />
Kevin: No. They're all there. I can see you're getting reflux.<br />
<br />
David: Boom. I wasted a little time. I waste a lot of time, these days.<br />
That was a cool thing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just think it was neat that you guys were willing to take chances<br />
with weird stuff.<br />
<br />
David: Where we took chances with really weird stuff was in the software.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Software publishing?<br />
<br />
David: We had a brand called, Sensational Software. Unfortunately, Ziff<br />
decided it was competing with some potential advertisers, which it<br />
was, in a sense. They killed it off. But, we had some really good<br />
stuff. We had the Apple game, what the heck was it? It was ported<br />
directly over from the arcade games.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Was it, "Space Invaders"?<br />
<br />
David: "Space Invaders."<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was a clone of, "Space Invaders"?<br />
<br />
David: It was the real.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You got it from, Jeff Lee's guy.<br />
<br />
David: Because, "Space Invaders," the Japanese game, was one of the first<br />
full-sized console video games where they used a general-purpose<br />
chip. "Space Invaders," was programmed for the 6502, Apple.<br />
We bought it from this Japanese company, and we had the only real<br />
"Space Invaders" game. That was one, and a couple of others that we<br />
really could have gone places with. That was just about the time<br />
that Ziff came in and said, "Nah, you can't have this anymore."<br />
<br />
They were into printed media, so, they kept the books going, but,<br />
not any of the other stuff. The other thing we had, was, speaking<br />
of computer music, a little division, that probably could have<br />
gotten a lot bigger, called Peripherals Plus. We were marketing a<br />
little computer music board, it was an S-100 bus once. But if we<br />
had then...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Didn't we have a plotter, too?<br />
<br />
David: Yep. We had about five or six interesting, low-level products. But,<br />
again, Ziff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That stuff was really competing with the advertisers.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Obviously, that wasn't our intent. But, yes it was. We also<br />
offered courses at that time. Do you remember, at County College?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't.<br />
<br />
David: That was just at when we moved into the new building at Hanover. We<br />
had two people that were doing that.<br />
<br />
Betsy: One of them was that crazy, Larry guy. He was seriously weird.<br />
<br />
David: County College of Morris, we reached an agreement that we would<br />
teach their Introductory Computer course. Not for their day<br />
students, but they offered evening courses, adult education, we<br />
were doing that. Fingers in a lot of pies, at that point.<br />
Actually, from that standpoint, it was, probably, good that Ziff<br />
got us a little bit more focused, and back to the roots of<br />
publishing. Getting spread a little thin.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You went to Atari, got the Atari game, and you did the "Atari<br />
Explorer," right?<br />
<br />
David: "Atari Explorer." They had had an occasional publication, not<br />
really a magazine, but one that was focused on the games, and they<br />
decided that they could start that one up again. It started up with<br />
a new name. We called it, "Atarian." It was focused, basically, on<br />
video games. You buy one of their video games and you get an issue.<br />
Anyway, there were different ways that they were going to promote<br />
it.<br />
But, a year later Nintendo just, absolutely, buried "Atarian," in<br />
'89. They kept Atari Spore going for, I think, two more issues,<br />
right?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Was it two?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember the details.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't much.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I remember why they killed it.<br />
<br />
David: Ms. Feisty here. Come on. You've got to tell the story here.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They were playing games with our printer. Production schedule.<br />
Everybody had a production schedule. We never missed our production<br />
date, getting things to the printer, getting them mailed. We just<br />
did it because that's what you had to do. I will probably get sued<br />
for this. Atari started not paying the printer and the printer says<br />
we're not going to print this until we get paid. The date kept<br />
slipping and slipping and the subscribers would be calling up and<br />
saying, "Where's my magazine?"<br />
This went on. It was bi-monthly. It went on for maybe six months. I<br />
finally wrote an editorial in which I explained to the readers<br />
exactly what was going on. They didn't see it until it was printed.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
David: That didn't get into the magazine, though.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It did.<br />
<br />
David: That's right, it did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They never saw it. We were producing it out of [inaudible 01:10:07]<br />
New Jersey and printing it in eastern Pennsylvania and they never<br />
saw it until it was too late. My tenure was cut short but I didn't<br />
really care at that point. I was sick of them. It was really hard.<br />
They're not easy people to deal with, even when the owners last for<br />
more than three months. That was my suicide by editorial. The only<br />
time in my life I've ever been fired.<br />
<br />
David: I didn't realize they didn't read that beforehand but I should<br />
have. I should have.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] I probably wouldn't have gotten fired if they had.<br />
<br />
David: That was the straw that broke the camera's back.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But then John [inaudible 01:11:05] kept doing it a little bit.<br />
<br />
David: I know. In a lot of cases, particularly with the games magazine,<br />
they wanted to approve everything that went in it. If you do an<br />
objective product review, you call it like it is. Oh m gosh, there<br />
was one, it wasn't just one product but a roundup after Consumer<br />
Electronics' show, and I don't remember what it was. Atari had<br />
brought out some new products that really weren't ready to go.<br />
In some cases I just said, "I'm not going to say anything about<br />
this one or these two or three. I'll focus on the ones that are<br />
ready to go or are in good shape." Oh my gosh. "What about this?<br />
This is a wonderful thing." "Well, maybe it will be but it isn't<br />
yet." We had issues all along on censorship and them changing what<br />
we had written and everything. As Betsy said, they were not nice<br />
people to work with. I forget, the two brothers.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Trammell.<br />
<br />
David: Trammell, yeah. That came from Commodore.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Jack and somebody else. Jack and his brother.<br />
<br />
David: It was interesting because yesterday I saw Nolan Bushnell. He was<br />
at that event. Nolan was flamboyant, but basically he had integrity<br />
and he was an honest guy. Man, oh man. Didn't stay and the<br />
corporation changed after he left.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Then you're done with Atari and then it's straight to military<br />
vehicles there?<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] No.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was a hiatus.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, man. We published magazines, in-house magazines, for a couple<br />
other organizations. Did one for Nabisco called...I don't even<br />
remember but it was for their marketing department. Published that<br />
for some period of time and then they decided to bring it in-house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was more like a newsletter.<br />
<br />
David: It was 16 pages. It was getting there.<br />
<br />
Betsy: 16 pages is a newsletter.<br />
<br />
David: All right. Magazine format. Let's put it that way. We did some<br />
fulfillment. Basically, a lot of freelance writing on the travel<br />
field.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Stuffed dogs. The stuffed dogs. Remember those four dogs for my<br />
brother?<br />
<br />
David: That's fulfillment. Fulfillment for Con Edison. I published a<br />
couple newsletters for a while, one called "Effective Investing"<br />
and one called "Effective Communication" for writers. We're talking<br />
early '90s.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was when people still cared, thought that there might be a<br />
correct way to do something and they wanted to know what it was.<br />
<br />
David: That was focused on "Take this computer and start to use it as a<br />
tool. Don't be afraid of the thing." '91/'92 not everybody was<br />
using a computer yet or a personal computer. That was the<br />
orientation of that. Then the other thing we got into big time was<br />
we'd been involved with a local rescue mission for men with drug,<br />
alcohol, homeless issues and we were writing and producing their<br />
newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We were producing all of their fundraising material.<br />
<br />
David: We started, I think, with the newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, we did everything. Appeal letters and newsletters and<br />
maintaining their database, the donor database. It took a lot of<br />
time.<br />
<br />
David: We did that for five years. Then '96 I got an opportunity to buy<br />
this crazy military vehicles magazine for people that were<br />
restoring old historic military vehicles. It was a magazine but it<br />
was I guess more of a glorified newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was horrible.<br />
<br />
David: It was horrible but it was really terrible. In fact, the editor or<br />
the publisher, whatever, the owner, he'd take the articles however<br />
the writer would send them. If it was double spaced type, boom,<br />
that's what would appear in the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Save all the typesetting.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He had zero typesetting expense.<br />
<br />
David: Zero editing. He just took anything that came in, put it in. Ads<br />
the same way. Half the ads were hand written. Well, not half, but a<br />
significant number had corrections on them by hand. Oh my gosh. It<br />
was so terrible. I made it into a real magazine and built it up. At<br />
that point the circulation had been about 10,000. We built it up<br />
and we were pushing close to 20,000 magazines. It was a real<br />
magazine. I sold it to Crowsey publications.<br />
Then they, which I did not realize at the time, the owner, Chet<br />
Crowsey, had put the whole company up for sale and he sold the<br />
company a year or two later to some other specialty magazine<br />
publisher. We're talking narrow, narrow niche. They published a lot<br />
of, what'd they call it, white tail bow hunting. Really, really<br />
narrow stuff. Up in northern Wisconsin is where they were based. In<br />
any event, he sold it.<br />
<br />
The new publishers, their whole stick was making money. They<br />
immediately raised the subscription price of military vehicles. We<br />
were charging $18 a year which was fine and they raised it to<br />
$21.95 or something and they raised the advertising rates and<br />
everything else.<br />
<br />
The last I knew, the circulation was back down around 10,000.<br />
[laughs] It doesn't pay off to take that approach. I didn't have<br />
the same emotional connection, with that as I did with Creative<br />
Computing and the other magazines there. Fine, you do what you want<br />
with the magazine, it's OK.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You didn't care too much?<br />
<br />
David: Nah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What do you guys do now? It seems like charity work and [inaudible<br />
01:19:45] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. I run a non-profit called Beyond the Walls and he runs his<br />
website and does Bible studies.<br />
<br />
David: Right. Actually, Betsy, the organization she has, she's executive<br />
director of Beyond the Wall, that's gotten huge.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's getting bigger and bigger.<br />
<br />
David: It's gotten huge.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think huge is probably an exaggeration.<br />
<br />
David: Well, not huge like a Gates Foundation thing.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I wish. We started in 2005 with 26 volunteers going to Guatemala to<br />
work with this organization that works with the people who scavenge<br />
in the Guatemala City garbage dump. The dump is in a ravine. It<br />
started in the early '50s and as it has filled up around the edges<br />
they put a couple layers of sand on it and let it sit for a bit and<br />
then the people build houses on it out of scraps and things that<br />
they made.<br />
This organization called Potter's House that we work with has been<br />
working with them for 26 years. They have an education program,<br />
micro-enterprise and health and various things that they do. Since<br />
2005 we've been sending volunteer teams. We're not the only ones<br />
sending volunteer teams down there to build houses and do<br />
healthcare and do stuff with the kids. So we started with 26 and by<br />
the end of the year we'll be well over 150 volunteers. We'll have<br />
three weeks this summer, I'll have 135 over three weeks this<br />
summer.<br />
<br />
It started in our backyard and one of the reasons that we wanted<br />
to...It started in the church and we started the organization<br />
partially because it's easier to raise money if you're not a church<br />
and it's also easier to make the volunteer opportunities available<br />
to people. If you say "Oh I'm going to Guatemala." "Oh I'd love to<br />
go with you! Who's going?" "It's my church." "Oh."<br />
<br />
But, if it's this local non-profit it's more appealing and we've<br />
really succeeded in doing that because we have people not only from<br />
in our own community, but this year we're going to have a family<br />
from Oklahoma, about six families from Texas, several people from<br />
Florida.<br />
<br />
David: You got the Virginia.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Virginia. It's like oh my goodness. How is this happening?<br />
<br />
Kevin: And everyone goes out to Guatemala and does the [inaudible<br />
01:22:31] ?<br />
[cross talk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. We all meet in Guatemala. I have three teams. One each week,<br />
and I'll be there the whole time and they'll come down and probably<br />
each team will build two or three houses. They'll do medical<br />
clinic, they'll do day camp for kids, soccer or baseball, sports<br />
things.<br />
They were about teenagers, so they love to do the...Everybody does<br />
construction in the morning. Then, in the afternoon teenage girls<br />
and some of the boys who want to do other stuff will help out with<br />
these other kid-related activities. That's what I'm doing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My wife is in Africa this week and last doing something similar.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Cool.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Which is why I have to leave shortly to go get my kids.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: What part of Africa is she in?<br />
<br />
Kevin: She did some stuff for Special Olympics. Then, they were helping<br />
build something at a food bank. I don't know that much yet, because<br />
she's not home yet.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Cool.<br />
<br />
David: That's terrific. She'll be changed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: She keeps telling that she wished I could've come, and I do, too.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You have this kid. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: We've got the two kids. The six-year-old doesn't feed herself real<br />
well.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: She can't drive to school.<br />
<br />
David: Your annual budget has gone from 0 to what? Are you going to hit<br />
about 150, 200,000 this year?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's over 300 already.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, OK. [laughs] 300.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's small potatoes compared to...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: As my boss, the Chairman of the Board, and I'm the only employee,<br />
is fond of saying, "The people out there don't realize that we're<br />
just a bunch of schlumps sitting around a table making this stuff<br />
up as we go along. Very good leadership. He's a very good leader.<br />
<br />
David: We were trying to maybe see if we can touch base with the Gates<br />
Foundation when we were up there. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: We got a brochure into his hands.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we got a brochure into his hands and some other stuff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was Bill Gates there?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah. I had a picture of him that I had taken at the first<br />
Altair convention in 1976, before he had actually made the deal<br />
with Altair to develop BASIC. He had said, "I can do it," but they<br />
hadn't signed the whole thing. I've got a picture of him as a 20-<br />
year-old or thereabouts, talking at this little convention.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You showed it to him?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. I gave him a copy. The problem I had is that...some people<br />
keep everything. I pretty much give everything away.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, you are lying. You keep everything.<br />
<br />
David: I do keep a lot of stuff. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Then, you give it away later. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Well, when Stan Freiberger was putting together the "Fire in<br />
the Valley" book, I gave him a lot of photographs and I gave him<br />
the originals. Then the publisher said, "It's not good enough. The<br />
photo. You get the negative." OK, they're gone. Never any of that<br />
came back. In fact, what I had to do is scan the photo from the<br />
book to make the print to give to Bill.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Photos of being young and cute.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was his Woody Allen phase. He looked exactly like Woody Allen<br />
did at that phase in his life.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:26:30] too.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm sure there is.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It is a lot [inaudible 01:26:33] .<br />
<br />
David: She improves with age. Every year.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I saw the picture! You look the same.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, the instant Paul Allen showed up, of course, everybody's<br />
mingling around this museum. All of a sudden there was like an<br />
arrow head over in that direction.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was this sucking sound.<br />
<br />
David: And then Bill shows up and, oh my God, everybody has to go see<br />
Bill.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was talking to Bob Rynett this morning, the guy who organized it,<br />
and he said, "Oh, Paul was very happy. Paul was very pleased with<br />
the way the event went." He said his only regret was that he and<br />
Bill didn't have enough time to spend with the people. And I'm<br />
thinking, "Well, OK, if you just stayed a little longer."<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Well, at least Paul Allen did come to the dinner.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, he stayed a little longer, but Bill, he was in and out like<br />
a...<br />
<br />
David: Bill was there for maybe an hour.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He just showed up because he had to.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, exactly. It was a cameo.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:27:52] cameo there?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, yes. There I am. I was thinner then. Oh! There's Ted in his<br />
hat! And Peter [inaudible 01:28:02] . Who's that guy?<br />
<br />
David: Dick Heiser was at the convention and he had one of the hats. The<br />
Xanadu hat.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was wearing one of those hats. The rings were actually silver.<br />
Oh and there's Johnny Anderson. He's the one that wrote that<br />
crazy...<br />
<br />
This was our building.<br />
<br />
David: That was the greenhouse garage building that we started. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: And there was a hole. Was it you or my brother that made a hole in<br />
the wall for an air conditioner?<br />
<br />
David: It was your brother.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And the building was painted white after...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is that the air conditioner? You comment about the low tech air<br />
conditioning.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, that was in an actual window. This building had been painted<br />
white after and right about here a hole had been made in the wall<br />
for this through-the-wall air conditioner. It was rented and when<br />
we moved out, we had this hole in the wall. So, my brother takes<br />
this spare ceiling panel that we had. It was white and sort of<br />
stuffed it in the hole and filled it up so that it really didn't<br />
show any more. We never heard any more about it.<br />
<br />
David: That building today is...<br />
<br />
Betsy: They've made it very fancy.<br />
<br />
David: Oh my gosh! It's a boutique shop and it's really nice. And they<br />
didn't even tear it down. It wasn't a tear-down and rebuild. At any<br />
event, we were not into spending money on facilities. Absolutely<br />
not. The last place that we were in was a printing company had<br />
owned it and they had taken three very small houses that backed up<br />
to railroad tracks and then they built a large warehouse at the end<br />
that was relatively modern. Then they just connected the three<br />
houses with little walkway and so we were in the first house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You couldn't tell that it was two houses.<br />
<br />
David: No. The art department was in the second, then the software group<br />
was in the third one. We had our fulfillment and storage and stuff<br />
in the warehouse.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How much money did you spend on the facility?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not much.<br />
<br />
David: We were spending money on expansion, growing, grow, grow. Then Ziff<br />
Davis comes in, they say, "You got this wonderful warehouse."<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's our warehouse now, right?<br />
<br />
David: That's right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It wasn't though, because you owned it.<br />
<br />
David: I know, but in any event, they said we're going to use it. We're<br />
moving some of your operation, advertising, sales into New York,<br />
therefore you will have more space. It wasn't the trade-off of the<br />
same kind of space or anything. What they did is, they have all<br />
these other magazines at that point, things like "Popular Boating"<br />
and "Yachting" and everything else. All of those magazines, when<br />
you subscribed you got a premium. You got a tote bag or something.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A backpack or a cushion.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. They moved all of their premium fulfillment out to our<br />
warehouse. They said, "Because you're not going to have a software<br />
department anymore, so you won't have to ship any software. We're<br />
going to bring all of our premiums out there." We still have<br />
"Yachting" bags.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yachting bags and seat bags.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Speaking of fulfillment that was something that we did. We were<br />
real pioneers in doing our own fulfillment.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: That's true...<br />
<br />
Betsy: All magazines then used fulfillment houses. You would just send all<br />
the little cards and white mail and everything to your fulfillment<br />
house and they would just take care, enter it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Reader service cards and...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Exactly, and then they would send the labels.<br />
<br />
David: Everything went either to Boulder, Colorado, Des Moines, Iowa, or<br />
some place in Florida.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So when you say pioneers, does that mean you were cheap?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well no, because we were not getting good service, we weren't happy<br />
with the service the readers were getting. And so we decided to<br />
bring it in it house, and we brought a program from a company in<br />
Boston that had written a program to run a PDP11.<br />
And we did we brought the whole thing in-house. We had our own data<br />
entry people. Did all the caging, taking the money out in-house.<br />
Printed our own labels and ship, because then you had to print them<br />
and ship them because there was no electronic delivery.<br />
<br />
David: You know we were real pioneers there and we did spent some money.<br />
Because PDP1170 was not a low-end, with a platter and disk, 12<br />
inch, maybe 15 inch, but a big, big platter drive, and data entry<br />
terminals, DECWriters, VT05. And when Ziff came in, I mean they<br />
were blown away that we were doing our own fulfillment, and doing a<br />
very efficiently.<br />
And the other thing we were doing also was the reader service<br />
cards. We were doing all our own processing of that. The same<br />
computer is same system. A Mini Data System, that's what it was.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No.<br />
<br />
David: No? OK.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mini data was the one you were using...<br />
<br />
[Day 2]<br />
<br />
<br />
David: A couple of the questions you asked yesterday got us to thinking<br />
about things we probably should have mentioned or clarified.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK let's go, let me grab a pen.<br />
<br />
David: One of the corrections, Betsy remembered better than I. the<br />
embezzlement that we were talking about was actually 79 not 78 it<br />
doesn't make a lot of difference but was a year later. It was a<br />
year after I had left my day job, and I was really depending upon<br />
Creative Computing for my income and everything else. So to lose<br />
that was a big blow at that time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So that could have been the end of things right there?<br />
<br />
David: Yes absolutely it could have.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was 79 not 78, is what you're saying.<br />
<br />
David: That's what I said it was 79 not 78.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I was going to ask you to move closer to the microphone.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Actually I don't have to do this. My ego is completely uninvolved.<br />
I would go sit and play with the cats.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Please, please be here. You supplement Dave's memory.<br />
<br />
David: Yes exactly she's very good at that.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: I want to know, how are you going to know how to spell things? He<br />
used the name John Dilks. If you go to write it out, how do you<br />
know how to spell John Dilks?<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'll either Google it, and if it's not in Wikipedia, I'll have to<br />
come back to you and ask, or if they're mentioned in the magazines.<br />
I'll do my best.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm not saying it in a critical way, I'm just impressed that you<br />
don't ask.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just feel this way, I can have everything. I don't have to write<br />
it down. I can concentrate on the conversation, rather than taking<br />
notes.<br />
<br />
David: OK. One thing I thought would be kind of worthwhile...putting the<br />
whole era of the early computer magazines into a perspective. In a<br />
sense, personal computing itself went through several eras as it<br />
accelerated and became so widespread. It certainly didn't start<br />
that way.<br />
You almost have to look at a period before there were personal<br />
computers -- the pre-personal computer era, which I would say would<br />
be 1972 or so up through '75, when the first computers came out.<br />
What was happening then was you had big time-sharing systems.<br />
<br />
Then, manufacturers like DEC and HP were making smaller time-<br />
sharing systems for terminals on a computer. Specifically, Bob<br />
Albrecht opened up People's Computer Company down in San Carlos,<br />
San Mateo, one of the "Sans." It was an open to the public place.<br />
What were people going to do with computers? Well, he wrote this<br />
book of what to do after you hit return, of games.<br />
<br />
Then I wrote my book, not for his center, but for people in the<br />
east that had access to the same type of things on DEC computers.<br />
Those two books actually came out in '72. That was well<br />
before....There was an impetus for people to use computers. Even<br />
though it was mini-computers and they didn't really have their own,<br />
they did have access.<br />
<br />
That, I think, was an important thing because, then, when the kit<br />
computers first came out, which is '75, we really had the kit<br />
computer era from '75 to around '78. That's when it primary was,<br />
the do-it-yourself, build-it-yourself.<br />
<br />
Who did those computers appeal to? It was largely people who were<br />
OK with things like soldering guns. That was largely HAM radio<br />
people. You look at "73" magazine and "Radio Electronics," those<br />
were the ones that dragged the hardware people into the field, and<br />
"Popular Electronics," of course, with the Altair in January, '75.<br />
<br />
You had to know something about, and be a little bit capable with<br />
your hands to get into it. That continued but dwindled off by 1980,<br />
because of course, in '78, you had the three biggies, not biggies,<br />
but self-contained, assembled computers: the Commodore PET, TRS-80,<br />
and the Apple all came out in '78. They were proprietary platforms,<br />
nobody was sharing stuff.<br />
<br />
Actually, the S-100 bus was more shareable. More people got a card<br />
that you could plug into the S-100 bus. There was more, but on the<br />
other hand, you had to build it. That was really a stumbling block<br />
for a lot of people. Then processor technology with the SAL. OK,<br />
here's an S-100 bus machine, but it's all built. That was a big<br />
leap.<br />
<br />
Anyway, you had the, what I call, proprietary era from '78 to '82.<br />
Then it kind of dwindled off, although Apple certainly kept going.<br />
When the IBM PC came out, '81, '82, '83, that ushered in the<br />
standardization era. Everybody, "OK, we're going to make an IBM PC<br />
clone." It was really only Apple, and to a lesser extent, the Atari<br />
and the Commodore that kept going with their own proprietary stuff.<br />
They really couldn't keep going.<br />
<br />
At that time, we started working with Atari. They using the same<br />
chip that Apple had. I thought, "Man, that's an opportunity. Why<br />
don't they just make an agreement with Apple to run Apple software<br />
and everything." They got a 6502, that family of chips in there,<br />
why not? But that wasn't Atari's way of doing things, as you well<br />
know.<br />
<br />
In any event, they went through those stages. As a new one came<br />
along, the other one died off. That though then affected the<br />
magazines, Creative Computing, we came from the pre-era, in a<br />
sense. From the education applications and people having access to<br />
small, minicomputer time sharing systems. When Altair basic was<br />
announced, then it was the obvious thing that we would port over<br />
programs to that.<br />
<br />
Other magazines such as "Byte" and some of the hardware magazines,<br />
they really came from the HAM radio end of things. Wayne Green, who<br />
started "Byte," was publishing "73," which was the biggest magazine<br />
in HAM radio. HAM fests were one of the earliest places where<br />
computers were, or at least hardware, do-it-yourself computers were<br />
really seen and popularized. Wasn't till a little later that we had<br />
computer festivals.<br />
<br />
The real early computer festivals in '75, '76, had a big overlap<br />
with Ham radio. The early ones in New Jersey. That was the earliest<br />
ones. It was, I think, more, not more, but at least half was<br />
oriented to Ham radio. Then, it broadened out, of course, with more<br />
applications being reproduced. Anyway, I think it's kind of<br />
important to know how things fit into that whole scheme of things.<br />
<br />
Magazines either came from the Ham radio and hardware side of<br />
things. They had a different perspective than those like Creative<br />
Computing.<br />
<br />
Well, Peoples' Computer Company, Bob Aldberg, could have had a real<br />
winning magazine, but he was too much in the alternative mode. So,<br />
Peoples' Computer Company never really made it as a magazine. He<br />
didn't want to do advertising or anything that would...<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was a different avenue. It was more like a tabloid-style<br />
newspaper.<br />
<br />
David: Newspaper, yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was more glossy.<br />
<br />
David: Exactly.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was a very different field.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Again, magazine publishing. I remember, early on, I was on a<br />
TV show. McNeil Lehrer Report on Public Broadcasting. Life Magazine<br />
was being re-launched and Time-Warner was spending a ton of money<br />
on this re-launch. They had the publisher of Life Magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was probably Time-Life back then. I don't think it...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. That's right. It wasn't Time. Well, I think it was close to<br />
the time that they merged. Anyway. Yeah. It was Time-Life. Then,<br />
they had me. Sort of the opposite extreme.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You're going to be covered in cat hair by the time you're here.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, I am sure.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's OK. But it matches and sort of goes with it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. It matches fine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You have kind of a theme here. The black and white.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes. Yes. Sorry to interrupt.<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, they were interviewing both of us. They were going to spend<br />
more money on their first issue than our entire annual budget, for<br />
everything. The difference in big publishers, because we we're<br />
talking about that a little bit yesterday, is huge. Really huge.<br />
Now, the interesting thing is there was a magazine back then. I<br />
don't know if it's still around today, called Folio. It was a<br />
magazine for magazine publishers. They covered all aspects of it.<br />
Subscription fulfillment, typesetting and everything else and the<br />
business aspects of running a magazine.<br />
<br />
They had some figures, which were true for a long period of time.<br />
That one out of seven magazine startups makes it for one year. One<br />
out of seven. That's low. Of those, one out of seven makes it for<br />
five years. So, were talking about...<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think Wayne told me almost the exact same statistic.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. One out of 50 new magazines makes it for five years or more.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: Once you make it five years, you're probably good to go for awhile.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
The new Life Magazine comes back, roaring back in. Where are they<br />
today, or even 10 years later from that point. Gone. Didn't make<br />
it. In any event, yesterday we were talking a little bit about<br />
where did we put all our money.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
David: Well, all our money wasn't an awful lot compared to big publishers.<br />
We were a small player. We're big in that field, but...<br />
<br />
Kevin: You're a big fish in a little bowl.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Yeah. There wasn't a lot. Betsy reminded me this morning that<br />
one of the things we did to, in a sense, keep control, is we bought<br />
our own typesetting equipment.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Used of course.<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Used.<br />
<br />
David: Used. Yes. We didn't want to send stuff out to a typesetter<br />
where...what did you [inaudible 00:14:22] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was the same thing with the fulfillment. You are sending it to a<br />
service that gives your work to a minimum wage person who couldn't<br />
care less. Puts her time in and...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Plus you still had code and things that needed to be done right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Done right. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Otherwise it was useless.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. We didn't typeset the code usually. We would actually pace<br />
down the printouts. Part of it was for efficiency and probably, in<br />
the long run, it was cheaper. Just to turn your typesetting around,<br />
send it out and wait for your galleys to come back. Then you<br />
proofread them. Then you'd send it back. Then they make the<br />
corrections maybe and you get it back again. So we said, well...and<br />
then we got this used, copy graphic was it?<br />
<br />
David: Mm-hmm. Yep.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Typesetter. Found a young woman who knew typesetting and hired her.<br />
We bought our own stat camera. We always used to have to send all<br />
the stats and [inaudible 00:15:34] out to be made.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: That was huge then before...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Had our own darkroom.<br />
<br />
David: ...everything was computerized publishing. Yeah. We had our own<br />
darkroom and our own stat camera with the thing that goes over a<br />
screen basically to make it into dots.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: To do that. To make those negatives or [inaudible 00:15:56] , which<br />
are the positive. That was something again. You sent it out and you<br />
get it back.<br />
I said, "Oh, you know what, we got a little more type here than<br />
expected. We want to crop this. Well, we send it out again, and oh<br />
my gosh." Doing all of that in-house, but it cost money. In a<br />
sense, just for the hardware and capital improvements that you<br />
needed to do that.<br />
<br />
We were spending it on that and expansion into other things like<br />
the software. One of the other ones that I was thinking of that we<br />
did, that certainly, really didn't bring us any tangible reward,<br />
was that we were doing some consulting when we started developing<br />
software. We started doing consulting to places like the<br />
Exploratorium in San Francisco. And Sesame Place. That was a big<br />
one for us.<br />
<br />
Sesame Place was a theme park right in our own backyard in New<br />
Jersey. They were going to have these terminals that you could go<br />
up to. One of the programs was Mix and Match the Muppets. You could<br />
take different parts of Muppets and combine them. We wrote a part<br />
of that routine and a whole bunch of stuff that made computers and<br />
these things not computers but approachable things for kids.<br />
<br />
We did some work for the Capital Children's Museum in Washington<br />
and Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Again, did it help us?<br />
Maybe. Did we gain a little reputation? Maybe. Did it translate to<br />
the bottom line? Probably not. As Betsy said, it was fun for you to<br />
do that, wasn't it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, it was fun. It gave him fun things to do.<br />
<br />
David: That was one way that we, in a sense, spent some money.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It makes sense. You guys were the computer experts, probably by<br />
orders of magnitude. Who are they going to go to?<br />
<br />
David: That's right. Interactive games, yeah. I already had a good selling<br />
book out there that was visible, known. We did a lot of that kind<br />
of stuff. Some of it was just fun to do. Another place where we put<br />
I won't say a lot of money but we went to a lot of these shows,<br />
well, there were some that were strictly personal computer shows,<br />
but then also tried to push into things like the consumer<br />
electronics show.<br />
We were the only magazine at the consumer electronics. That's a<br />
huge, huge show. Twice a year, one in Chicago and one in Las Vegas.<br />
We'd take the smallest booth that you could but, still, it was a<br />
fair chunk of change to go to that, but that's how I felt we got<br />
the reach. They were pushing at a lower level. That was video games<br />
mostly at that point. Although we weren't in that market, I just<br />
felt that that was someplace that we wanted to be.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you think that was worthwhile?<br />
<br />
David: I don't know. We were mainly looking for retail stores to sell the<br />
magazine. That was my main purpose for going there. No, it probably<br />
wasn't. It probably was not and it cost us a lot of money to go to<br />
the shows. You have to experiment and do those things. We started<br />
reporting on new developments at the consumer electronics show and<br />
there was some overlap with Computer Inc but it was mostly video<br />
games. No, it didn't have a real good payoff. [laughs]<br />
Then there was the Boston show we went to where Betsy's feistiness<br />
really came out. You go to those shows. I'm not talking about one<br />
of these local computer shows or something. You go to a big show.<br />
You've got to use union labor. We had a computer at our booth. We<br />
wanted to plug it in. You're going to plug in your computer? No,<br />
you can't plug it in. You've got to hire an electrician for an hour<br />
for $75 to plug in your computer.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was a bit extreme. I don't think that was actually true.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know how much it was but you had to use union labor for<br />
different things. Betsy took exception to that at one show and<br />
actually came to blows.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was carrying stuff off the show floor. We were trying to get out.<br />
It was in Boston and we were going to drive back and we were trying<br />
to...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Go home at the end of the show?<br />
<br />
Betsy: ...go home at the end of the show. We were just carrying our<br />
cartons of leftover magazines and books and some union guy comes to<br />
me and starts telling me you can't do this and he was being very<br />
rude. So I punched him in the arm. [laughs] They were not happy.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you have to hire a special punching person to do that?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yes, exactly. I should have consulted with the shop steward before<br />
doing that.<br />
<br />
David: There was a follow-up to that. I'm not absolutely sure but I think<br />
the guy that was running that show was Shelley Adelman. He then<br />
approached us after that little incident. You can't do this. Betsy<br />
was really in his face about come on. We're a tiny little nit. Sure<br />
we can do it. We can carry our own stuff.<br />
Shelley Adelman, whose name you probably heard today, in a sense,<br />
got his start by running these smaller shows around the country and<br />
then he built up to running PC Expo in New York and Las Vegas and<br />
then he got into you run a show in Las Vegas you've got to make<br />
deals with the hotels and so on.<br />
<br />
The earlier PC shows in Las Vegas did not use the convention<br />
center. They were held in I think probably the Hilton. He got to<br />
know hotel people there and he started buying into hotels and today<br />
Shelley Adelman is huge. Not Caesars but he owns one of the really<br />
big casino operations. He's on Forbes list of top 100 wealthiest<br />
Americans.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sure he only uses union labor.<br />
<br />
David: I'm sure he does, absolutely. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's how he got where he is.<br />
<br />
David: We've crossed paths with some interesting people in different ways.<br />
There was another one I was thinking of. Actually, this is jumping<br />
around a little bit. Editorial, in different people submitting<br />
articles and then some people I would ask would you do something<br />
for us early, early on. That's another thing we went to. I went to<br />
comic cons and the sci-fi cons to promote the magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was early.<br />
<br />
David: That was early, very early. I've got to tell you one little<br />
incident there. I also went to small press publisher conventions. I<br />
went to one over Labor Day weekend, and I don't know what year it<br />
was. It was probably '75, '76 maybe. The place that they gave this<br />
small press to exhibit was one platform up in the subway under<br />
Lincoln Center.<br />
Lincoln Center, of course, huge, but down one level is not shops.<br />
There may be a few shops but it was a big, open platform. That's<br />
where we were exhibiting. I had my magazines out there on a table<br />
and I was talking to these other underground publishers and so on,<br />
typical.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's why they put you there. It's underground.<br />
<br />
David: Underground, yes. It was a Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Saturday,<br />
Sunday, Monday. I said, "I can't be here on Sunday." Talked to the<br />
person next to me and I said, "I'm just going to leave a cigar box<br />
that says put your money in the box." He said, "You're nuts. We're<br />
in a New York subway system. You're going to come back with nothing<br />
in your box." I left a bunch of change in it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: And your ex-wife said you were too trusting.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] Yes. I left like 15 single dollar bills in there so people<br />
could make change and I just left it there, from Saturday to Monday<br />
and I came back Monday, about $40, $50 in the box. I don't know<br />
whether it paid for everything that was taken but it worked out<br />
fine. Yes, I was obviously too trusting, but at roughly the same<br />
time there was something going on. I think it was a sci-fi<br />
convention or world future society. Yeah, it was world future<br />
society convention.<br />
They had some notable people there. I was sitting down with Alvin<br />
Toffler in the lobby of the Colosseum and along comes over to us<br />
Isaac [inaudible 00:27:03] (ED: from context, they are talking about<br />
Isaac Asimov). What a wonderful little party. We had some coffee in<br />
the Colosseum and I said, "Isaac, can you write me an article?"<br />
"I got a good story from the robot series that hasn't been widely<br />
used or published and you can use that." So I got an early <br />
contribution from Isaac [inaudible 00:27:27] and Alvin<br />
Toffler wrote something for us.<br />
<br />
Anyway, got to know some interesting people at that point. Then who<br />
should submit an article, and by this time Betsy was the editor...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Out of transom comes an article from Michael Creighton. It was a<br />
program. I can't remember what it was about.<br />
<br />
David: For the Apple.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was a program for the Apple, but it was something really dumb.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know if you remember, we were reminded when Harry Garland<br />
was up at the thing in Seattle. Harry Garland was one of the first<br />
ones to produce an independent manufactured a board, a 100 bus<br />
board, for the Altair, and this was really early, and he called it<br />
the TV Dazzler. It made little squares light up but he could make<br />
lots of them light up in different colors or just a few. It was a<br />
silly program but people said we can do graphics on this.<br />
He eventually developed it into quite an interesting graphics tool,<br />
I guess. People did buy the TV Dazzler for itself but the purpose<br />
was here's a board you could produce graphics, do some graphics. In<br />
any event, that's essentially what Michael Creighton's program did<br />
for the Apple. Not much.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This was not early on.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, it was after the Apple 2 was out.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was probably...<br />
<br />
David: '80.<br />
<br />
Betsy: 1980, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you publish it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. I rejected it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: I'm like we're going to reject an article from Michael Creighton?<br />
<br />
Betsy: We both liked Michael Creighton as an article.<br />
<br />
David: Oh my gosh. But we did. We really did. We had standards.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Later on, though, he wrote something. It was better. It wasn't<br />
great. He did write something better and we did accept it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Orson Scott Card wrote for Compute, I think. I don't know if he was<br />
Orson Scott Card at that point, but [inaudible 00:30:00] .<br />
<br />
David: We've crossed paths with some people.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [inaudible 00:30:09] was actually very nice<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, 6 foot 8, big guy. He was very nice. Unfortunately, he died.<br />
On the other end of things, early on, we really were...this was<br />
probably even before Betsy got in...kind of in the small press<br />
underground publishing movement as much as in the legitimate big<br />
magazines, because that's kind of where I started.<br />
<br />
Betsy: When I came, we had just published the first sleek, coated paper<br />
magazine and coated stock. In October 1978, I believe, that was<br />
published. That was the first of the coated stock. That was kind of<br />
the bridge to legitimacy.<br />
<br />
David: For the first two years, [inaudible 00:31:09] news print and I had<br />
a little tie in with some of the small press people. I was learning<br />
about publishing from small press review, I got to know some of the<br />
people who were doing successful publishing. A lot of them were<br />
magazines and comics out of San Francisco.<br />
So I got to know a little bit [inaudible 00:31:46] and Gilbert<br />
Shelton and Sherry Flannigan, and some of those early, Bobby<br />
London. So anyway, one ad we ran real early on was an adaptation of<br />
Renee and Robert Crompton. Go ahead and change my thing to creative<br />
computing. Go for it. Sherry Flannigan she did a comic strip called<br />
Tronch and Bonnie, Tronch was a little dog and Bonnie was a little<br />
girl and they occasionally got mixed up with a robot dog.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there some sort of falling out with that person?<br />
<br />
David: With Sherry? No. I'm still friends with her on Facebook. They had a<br />
major, major problem, she was involved with Gary Hallgrin and I<br />
forget who the publisher was, McNeil, Bobby London. They were the<br />
Air Pirates funniest group that Disney took to task, that caused<br />
the death of a lot of publishing in the underground comics<br />
movement.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I don't understand.<br />
<br />
David: Air Pirates were funny, they were just looking for trouble. They<br />
had Disney characters flying planes and getting into all kinds of<br />
trouble and getting into problems that Disney characters never<br />
would have done, sexual problems as well as just acting badly.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Disney just said, "We can't put up with this." It was an<br />
interesting case, because was it a copyright violation, not really<br />
because they were character look-a-likes, but they weren't calling<br />
them Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck but they looked the same or very<br />
similar. But, it was a landmark case in underground comics, it<br />
caused a lot of them to pull back, a lot on the satire and stuff<br />
that they were publishing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I asked about Sherry because a number of years ago when I had first<br />
put the best of [inaudible 00:34:29] on my website, then after a<br />
while I got an email saying, "Look, you have to take this<br />
[inaudible 00:34:37] ." I would copyright all, it was just like<br />
waving arms. So I took it down but it was, I thought, maybe it<br />
was...<br />
<br />
David: Well that whole copyright trademark thing, there interpretation<br />
that really, really strict...everything that goes on the Internet<br />
is a public domain. Well, that is not really true either. Are you<br />
making money from copyrighted material? If you are then that's a<br />
pretty clear violation. Are you affecting the copyright owners<br />
ability to make money with it? That's a violation.<br />
I'm kind of in this right now with Uruguay and TinTin, those books<br />
have inspired a lot of people to make parodies and fake TinTin<br />
covers. TinTin at the beach, places TinTin wouldn't normally go.<br />
Well is it affecting the sales of TinTin books, or is it actually<br />
increasingly them?<br />
<br />
Casterman, who owns and [inaudible 00:36:07] owns the TinTin<br />
copyrights. They are really going after some of these people, but<br />
I'm not sure that they have a really good case. So some people take<br />
everything off and don't want nothing on the website. And others<br />
are saying, "Hey, this is legitimate." I have collected a lot of<br />
those covers, and put them up on a website.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I guess you'll find out soon enough.<br />
<br />
David: I will find out, soon enough.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They may not be right legally, but how hard do you want to fight<br />
it.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: I think that they have to demonstrate that it's hurting them in<br />
some way. One last thing, from the question you asked yesterday,<br />
back to the money issue, when I sold the magazine, right at that<br />
time I took 15 percent of what I had received, and donated it to<br />
charities. I have in a sense signed on, although not as an official<br />
signee to the Gates-Buffet initiative to give away half of my<br />
wealth, while I am alive.<br />
At one point in time you can compute that, I have already given<br />
away more than I have received for Creative Computing to Charity.<br />
Of course, it had grown a little bit and we made reasonably decent<br />
investments and that is why it continued to grow. But, I'm really<br />
committed to doing that. My kids are not going to inherit it all.<br />
That's just the way it is, that is the way I believe. Put my money<br />
where my heart is. Anyway,<br />
<br />
Kevin: Other question is, you said something yesterday, I should follow up<br />
that one. You said something about stealing Basic.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well there was this big thing. Just the night before last, at this<br />
dinner we went to, where all the people who were at the first MITS<br />
conference and they referred to the letter that Bill Gates wrote.<br />
<br />
Kevin: "Why are you stealing my software?"<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well exactly. That was just a reference to that Bill Gates, which<br />
had just been brought back to my memory by that. People were<br />
telling stories at this. Instead of having an after dinner speaker<br />
they were just passing the mic around and people were talking about<br />
incidents and things from the past.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you get to sell the story to this group of...?<br />
<br />
David: Not really, I was just followed up on something [inaudible<br />
00:39:24] .<br />
<br />
Betsy: Some of those stories were really boring.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: Oh yeah, long and boring. It's an interesting thing though, about<br />
basic itself, but it was developed at an educational institution<br />
originally by Kemeny and Kurtz at Dartmouth. And they, either<br />
deliberately or because they had gotten a lot of grant money from<br />
General Electric in the early time sharing systems, they basically<br />
let anybody use their Basic.<br />
It was developed at Dartmouth but later Honeywell put a system in<br />
at Minnesota or Florida or someplace else. They could use Basic,<br />
they could have a no license fee or anything. That made Basic a<br />
universal language that was available, at least that version of<br />
Basic. If you write a different version of Basic, where does that<br />
fall? These are some sort of violation and you need some<br />
permission. And basically Kemeny and Kurtz said, "No, you don't."<br />
And they allowed Basic to be used and developed by others.<br />
<br />
Digital Equipment, at the same time, maybe even earlier, but<br />
roughly the same time, had developed also an interactive language<br />
called Focal. And Focal in many regards was more efficient than<br />
Basic, because they were running it on many computer and there was<br />
less memory to work with. On the other hand, and this was true<br />
Digital...as time went on, they said, "No, nobody can use Focal. We<br />
are not going to let, especially those people [inaudible 00:41:59]<br />
." But any place else, nobody could use Focal.<br />
<br />
I think it wound up with a situation like Sony and Betamax. Sony<br />
saying, "Betamax is ours and it is a better format that VHS," which<br />
it was. But then, JVC saying, "We have VHS and Toshiba. Hey do you<br />
want to use it? Fine, we'll license it to you for next to nothing."<br />
<br />
Kevin: You think Focal could have been Basic.<br />
<br />
David: I think it could have been very big. I think it could there could<br />
have been very serious competition between the two languages, but<br />
by Digital limiting it only to their own computers and specifically<br />
to their mini computers, not even the big mainframes, it really<br />
limited the spread of Focal. In fact, it forced me to go out to the<br />
developers and people in educational institutions they wanted<br />
Basic.<br />
There were few schools and colleges in Boston area, near DEC that<br />
were OK with Focal. But stuff was getting published by Minnesota<br />
Educational Computer Consortium and others in Basic, [inaudible<br />
00:43:32] computer project. So they wanted Basic. [laughs] I had to<br />
go on. I hired one group, actually it turned out to be just an<br />
individual guy in Brooklyn that developed a Basic for 4KPDP8. Well<br />
Basic took 3.5K, I gave you 500 words, 512 bit not even the 16 bit,<br />
at least get 2 bits per...but 500 words the right programs. Wasn't<br />
much.<br />
<br />
So that forced Lunar Lander and [inaudible 00:44:15] and some of<br />
those programs actually. Some of them I imported over from Focal<br />
into Basic. And then we had a machine that had 8K. We had a<br />
different version of Basic because Hewlett Packard had a machine<br />
that read cards, mark sense cards. We had to have a different<br />
version of basic for that. Then we had a timeshare Basic. We had<br />
six versions of Basic, five actually on the PDP8 family. It was<br />
absurd, it was crazy, but we had to do it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I was going to ask you, the process of like...you started<br />
saying...you interrupted yourself. You said, "People would submit<br />
articles and then..." I don't know what you were going to say next.<br />
But [inaudible 00:45:08] that I wanted to ask you like just the<br />
process of how the magazine got made. You got an article was,<br />
somebody just typed up or something and...<br />
<br />
Betsy: You mean the mechanics of the production?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We can receive most of the articles for the magazine came over the<br />
transom. And we would get these articles and our editorial system<br />
would log them in and pass them around to editorial staff. John<br />
Anderson and Russell [inaudible 00:45:42] .<br />
<br />
David: Peter Fee.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Peter Fee.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What does it mean over the transom?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Means they weren't solicited. Somebody in the middle of the night<br />
jumped to know [laughs] or through the mailbox. We put a little<br />
piece of paper on there and the guys would write their opinions.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] That is serious.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Some of the things they said. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Like what? What would they say?<br />
<br />
Betsy: "Don't quit your day job." [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: And then they had the rubber stamp.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Somebody found a stamp. Everything that we had was used, including<br />
our desk and everything. And somebody found, at the back of the<br />
desk, a stamp. It said San Marcos on it. This was like the ultimate<br />
insult. [laughs] San Marcos, like you know, "Get out of here."<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Send it to San Marcos?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Send it to San Marcos, wherever that was. Ultimately, I would make<br />
the final decision whether we were going to publish this or not.<br />
Once we were well established, the vast majority of them went back.<br />
We never returned manuscripts. And they would come with piles of<br />
code. A lot of them were programs and, we would decide and the<br />
editorial assistants job to notify the person. Then we bought all<br />
rights, didn't we?<br />
<br />
David: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
Betsy: North American Serial rights, that's what we bought for everything.<br />
Then they would go into a cube. Sometimes we would say something,<br />
"Oh, this is going to go really well with this educational<br />
institute that we're doing in June," Like that one is for June or<br />
just put it in the queue and we will see when it comes or rises to<br />
the top or whatever.<br />
The more technical editors like, John Anderson, he was our best guy<br />
ever. They would go through the code and make sure the code worked,<br />
and I would edit them for content and correct them.<br />
<br />
David: For English and Grammar.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, with a pen and pencil. Then they would go to our typesetter.<br />
Typesetter would correct them. And then they would come back, and I<br />
think, our lower level editorial assistant would proofread them,<br />
but proofread a lot of them too. When they came out typesetter, it<br />
was on a smooth shiny paper.<br />
<br />
David: Photographic paper.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And then, if they had screenshots or anything the art department<br />
would make them into photo stats or [inaudible 00:49:02] . And then<br />
when it was time for them to go to press they would put them on<br />
boards, pieces of cardboard, white paper...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So you paste up?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, they do the paste up and put it on there.<br />
<br />
David: The boards were using non reproducing blue on its photograph. They<br />
had different outlines, blue defined columns, both two and three<br />
column pages and upper limits and page numbers and all that kind of<br />
stuff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: We were still doing it on [inaudible 00:49:43] newspaper in 1990.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well that's exactly it, so you know what we're talking about. And<br />
then once you get it all together and then again somebody has got<br />
to read it to make sure there is no lines left out, particularly of<br />
the programs. Make sure that those all still make sense. There were<br />
many cases where line got left out or artists cuts off a things and<br />
realizes, "Oh, I mean to cut it short." And that whole line<br />
disappears and then you send it off to be printed and all the<br />
subscribers get a little upset because Startrek doesn't run.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: So that sort of thing happened frequently or often?<br />
<br />
David: With typeset material, not much at all. But with program listings,<br />
program listings were really tough. Because you would have people<br />
that would submit something, and they'd have a really cheap, low-<br />
end dot matrix printer. And we always encouraged people, if you're<br />
going to submit a program, submit it in some machine-readable form.<br />
So we don't want to type them all in to make sure they work. Even<br />
though our readers are going to have to, but we don't want to have<br />
to do that. So send us. But even so, we might then print it off on<br />
one of our slightly higher end printers. But I'll tell you what,<br />
you have page breaks and everything else. And the Art department<br />
didn't have a clue about programs and stuff. The program would get<br />
stated down. We weren't using the full sized type for program<br />
listings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. At that point we hadn't the ability to make them fit.<br />
<br />
David: That's where the most common place that you'd lose a line or<br />
something. It would get photographed, and when it's coming out of a<br />
line printer, you might have one or two lines on the following<br />
page. "Oh, we forgot that."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Personally, I know it said so much about magazine that when it<br />
continued, there were just sometimes a handwritten area going,<br />
"Continued over here." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Oh, absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was a early.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It wasn't professional, and that was awesome. It was just like,<br />
"OK."<br />
<br />
Betsy: Then what we would do, we would request when we...we would solicit<br />
articles. Like if there was a new Apple peripheral that we wanted<br />
to review, we'd get the product. Then a lot of times, our own guys<br />
wanted to review the stuff, but if it was something that we didn't<br />
have time for, or that was better suited to one of our freelancers,<br />
we would send it out and ask for a review of it.<br />
A lot of reviews came in over the transom too, but we tried to be<br />
careful of those, that they were not either trying to justify their<br />
own purchase of whatever it was or get even with the publisher for<br />
producing it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Or written by the... [crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: That really wasn't an issue at the time, it was a more innocent<br />
time. That really didn't happen much, but it was, sometimes, people<br />
would get a product they didn't care for and totally bash it, then<br />
we have to go and figure out is it really that bad. We tend to not<br />
produce seriously negative...if it was a really bad product we just<br />
ignored it.<br />
<br />
David: We tried to be objective with reviews, but before I got into the<br />
computer field at all I was in market research. There are a number<br />
of biases, too, that really overwhelmingly affect all kinds of<br />
market research polls or surveys. One is that people think they're<br />
better than they are. For example, if we were doing a poll or a<br />
research study, we'd put a question on basically designed to show<br />
the executives who were using this data that there were some<br />
biases.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He's not talking about Creative Computing.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: No, no. This was way earlier. I'm talking about Proctor and Gamble<br />
products or general foods or that kind of thing. Anyways, the<br />
question we put on was "please rank your driving ability," and we<br />
had from well below average, accident waiting to happen up to Mario<br />
Andretti, Danica Patrick, over there. And you know what, 99 percent<br />
of the population ranked themselves better than the average. Where<br />
is your average then? Its way high.<br />
The other thing, equally pervasive in a sense, is that people<br />
wanted to justify a decision, a purchase decision. In fact, back<br />
the 30s, the slogan for Ford Motor Company was ask a man that owns<br />
one. You ask a man that owns and has made a decision to buy this<br />
car, he's going to say "Yeah, it is the greatest car." So you put<br />
on questions, again, throwaway questions.<br />
<br />
If you had this, or if you were an owner of whatever car it is that<br />
you have. "What do you have now? Would you buy another one?" People<br />
"Oh, yes. This is a great decision. I love this car." I'll tell you<br />
where you can find out, is you look at what percentage of people<br />
that did own that particular car did buy another one? They're<br />
always way lower than they those that say they would buy another<br />
one. It gets more pronounced with higher prices.<br />
<br />
If you've made a decision to buy a high-priced car, you're going to<br />
think, "I'll tell you what. This Land Rover was the best car I have<br />
ever bought." 78 percent of people might say, "I'm going to buy<br />
another one." About 15 percent of the people actually do.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So [inaudible 00:56:49] magazine because people want to justify a<br />
review.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. That's exactly right. And as Betsy said, it could go the<br />
other way, too. "I think I'm getting screwed here with this product<br />
and I'm going to knock it." When you get reviews, in essence, over<br />
the transom, they're either justifying, "This was really wonderful.<br />
I made a great decision buying this particular product," or "I hate<br />
it." It's hard to know whether the review was really objective and<br />
realistic.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you ever push-back from advertisers?<br />
<br />
David: All the time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Can you tell me?<br />
<br />
Betsy: We would feel the pushback from our ad sales people. They would say<br />
"So and so is annoyed with you because you didn't put it." We very<br />
rarely put anybody's totally negative reviews, but we tried to be<br />
objective, and not every product is perfect. Almost every product<br />
is going to have some negative feature.<br />
We would put those in and the advertisers would then go to their ad<br />
rep and complain. Then the ad rep would come to us and say, "Why<br />
are you doing this? These people are mad. I have to sell them ads."<br />
We would just say "Separation of church and State. You are<br />
advertising in this magazine because it's a credible magazine, and<br />
if we let you push us around, it won't be credible anymore, and<br />
then it will reflect on your ad."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you remember anyone ever pulling ads [inaudible 00:58:39] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't, offhand. Do you?<br />
<br />
David: No, but I can tell you the opposite. There were a couple of<br />
magazines that almost ran manufactured press releases as product<br />
reviews. They did get more advertising than we did from some<br />
manufacturers that liked that. I hate to name names, but Compute<br />
Magazine. I don't think you'll find any negative reviews in Compute<br />
Magazine. Everything was the greatest thing since sliced bread.<br />
Personal Computing, similar, very positive. "Gee whiz" reviews on<br />
almost all the things that they saw. It just isn't that way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You have talked about [inaudible 00:59:49] . We've talked briefly<br />
at least about the other magazines. Sync, the one about Timex<br />
Sinclair. I understand the allure of publishing a magazine geared<br />
to a specific system, but why did you pick Timex Sinclair? [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Probably two reasons. One is that we had more of a presence in<br />
England than most of the other magazines.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Still do.<br />
<br />
David: We had a very early agreement with David Tebbet, who was the co-<br />
publisher of Personal Computer, something-or-other. It might have<br />
been Personal Computer World. Yes, it was.<br />
<br />
Betsy Ahi: Yes it was Personal Computer World, and when PC world started they<br />
had to call it PC World because there was already a Personal<br />
Computer World in England.<br />
<br />
David: And we had an agreement that they would reprint materials from<br />
Creative Computing, which they did for a while but then they<br />
developed their own in-house capabilities and there was enough<br />
differences. We went to England and very early on had an agent in<br />
England that we could take subscriptions.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A housewife who kept her dark issues in her spare bathroom.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we still know her. Hazel Greaves, Hazy. Anyway, so we were<br />
getting enough subscriptions from England. We were sending over, I<br />
don't know how they packaged them up, but they call them Mbags, M-<br />
bags, mail bags basically of magazines, then we mail them from<br />
England. So I had more of our connection with British market than<br />
probably any of the other magazines, we definitely did.<br />
And so I get to know Clarkson Clair and what's going on over there.<br />
And then when they bring over the computer to this country and<br />
Timex, my God, big outfit. They were going to market it. By that<br />
time you know, there was no point starting a [inaudible 01:02:25]<br />
magazine or an entire magazine. They were, Or Apple, they were<br />
already existed. So maybe this is going to be the next big one. We<br />
will be right there when they start and we were.<br />
<br />
Timex actually put, what we had simple, simple sink or something<br />
but it was in the package with the computer. So that was one way of<br />
getting our subscriber base and we couldn't possibly afford to<br />
advertise and do direct mailings for magazine like that. But they<br />
were in essence helping us go on. So that's why it is pretty<br />
successful actually. Often, we were making money on the magazine<br />
mainly because we didn't have to promote it.<br />
<br />
If we had to get subscriptions, we could not have possibly made it<br />
work. There wasn't enough advertising really. I don't know what the<br />
issue here was, but it was not as good as we would have liked it.<br />
The magazine would have been tiny if we maintained the same<br />
advertising to edit ratio we would have liked. But we didn't lose<br />
money out of it but we didn't make anything out of it either. I<br />
think it was a breakeven proposition.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Microsystems. [inaudible 01:04:09] .<br />
<br />
David: I said there was a lot of early development in New Jersey and there<br />
was a guy named Saul Libes, you will find him probably, [laughs]<br />
who was the first president of the Amature Computer Group in New<br />
Jersey. He was a Professor at [inaudible 01:04:43] College and he<br />
felt that Byte magazine started out fine but then they were<br />
focusing more on assembled hardware and things that were already<br />
made.<br />
So he wanted to get down on really lower level of do it yourself,<br />
build it yourself. Microsystems was more like Byte was in the very<br />
beginning, focusing on circuit diagram, this was logic in PC's and<br />
everything.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There first name was S100, Microsystems<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, S100 perhaps then it became Microsystems in '78 or '79. When<br />
some of the others came out they started [inaudible 01:05:45] 6800<br />
and 68,000 chips from Motorola. But I would say it was a really<br />
techy magazine and it was one that I think probably killed that one<br />
off.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was dead before [inaudible 01:06:05] . [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: It might have been. I don't know, but it was...<br />
<br />
Betsy: S100 bus did not survive and to the [inaudible 01:06:12] .<br />
<br />
David: It was dead before as there was these eras and the do it yourself<br />
S100 era,that was '75 to '78. Then it kind of had a downward spiral<br />
of two or three years and it was gone. Well, maybe it wasn't gone<br />
but it wasn't the same. And so Microsystems was tuned into that and<br />
they were running hardcore stuff.<br />
And the reason that Saul...we reach an agreement with him to<br />
publish it, is basically he didn't have any real magazine<br />
background. We thought we could do something with it. It turned out<br />
not to be a good fit bit we published it for a while. I don't know<br />
if we made money or lost money on that. Probably it didn't make<br />
anything. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Small business computers or computing.<br />
<br />
David: What?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Small business computers? Who do we buy that from? I can't even<br />
remember. You can't even remember that we had it, I can tell by the<br />
look on your face<br />
<br />
David: I can<br />
<br />
Betsy: That one of my brothers...my brother was a publisher remember?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I don't know who or where we got it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That just fall into grave or...?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Eventually, but that we post it for a while. I think is something<br />
that somebody basically left on our door step.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think it was kind of like a puppy on the... [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: I think it came with your brother.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, because my brother wasn't into publishing until after clearing<br />
college.<br />
<br />
David: It sounded like a good idea at the time.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think we saw a future in business computing<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we did and unfortunately that was one word as if they just<br />
want...I mentioned yesterday that they wanted to really shift the<br />
focus of Creative Computing away from home and broaden out and<br />
shifted into the small business market. And just did not, it was an<br />
uncomfortable fit. We would've been better to have a separate<br />
magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember where we got Small Business Computing from or<br />
where it went.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know, either.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But I know that obviously it wasn't a huge acquisition.<br />
<br />
David: It was a footnote.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A footnote in the story. [laughs]<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Actually, a bigger acquisition was earlier and that was Rom<br />
Magazine. Rom was published by who?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Erik Sandberg-Diment.<br />
<br />
David: Right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: D-I-M-E-N-T.<br />
<br />
David: Connecticut. He did a nice job with the magazine, very nice job<br />
with it. Published nine issues and a little different focus than<br />
Creative but it really overlapped us very nicely. He had more<br />
graphic stuff. In fact, it was through him that I got to know<br />
George Baker and some of the people up there. The other guy that<br />
did the pixelated blocks photos. You've seen those.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The Einstein.<br />
<br />
David: [crosstalk] The Lincoln with block pics.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Block pics.<br />
<br />
David: Block pics. OK, he and George Baker sort of came as a package with<br />
Rom, they knew of each other. We actually, I would say, four or<br />
five issues, ran Rom as a whole separate section and even set it on<br />
the cover of Creative Computing and Rom. Then it became evident...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think that was because he had a whole other editorial kicking<br />
around. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We bought.<br />
<br />
David: Could be. And then we would just merge it in completely, but that<br />
was a very good fit. It brought us more editorial than it did<br />
subscribers. They did not have a big subscriber base, but it was a<br />
nice marriage in a sense.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Video and Arcade Games only published I think four issues.<br />
<br />
David: Three.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Three?<br />
<br />
David: Actually, three but if you've got a hold of the third one, you're<br />
doing well. I think Ziff cut that off after two real issues got<br />
mailed out. We did a third one but it wasn't sent out to<br />
subscribers.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My website only has two issues.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. There were only two that really were distributed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So I have...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: A goal. [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, if you can get a hold of the third one. [laughter] I don't<br />
even have that. There's a same thing on Tarry-on. There were three<br />
issues of Tarry-on that I did not keep the third issue. Oh, man.<br />
Shoot me.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: But Video and Arcade Games, there were at least five or six other<br />
magazines focusing on that. Talk about magazines that were running<br />
non-objective manufacture-provided reviews, all the others were. I,<br />
maybe, convinced myself and some people at Davis that there was a<br />
need for really objective...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ziff? Did Ziff do that?<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Were we with Ziff when we did that?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah. That was a late one. So we said, let's...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Continue it through.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, that was definitely. Let's do it. But again...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not only that but it was going to be fun.<br />
<br />
David: It was going to be a lot of fun. [laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: So why did it fail?<br />
<br />
David: OK, again you got to look at the eras and what was happening.<br />
Arcade games then really were on the decline. Video arcades where<br />
you go in and pop a quarter in, because there was so much more<br />
capability in the home computers and the [inaudible 01:12:55] and<br />
the Mattel and the different home systems. They could do all now,<br />
not as much, but you get a pretty darned good game that you could<br />
take home with you and not have to pop a quarter in the slot every<br />
time you play.<br />
So arcade games were kind of on the downward spiral, so that<br />
eliminated a lot of potential advertising. We weren't going to get<br />
any advertising from Nameco and all of the producers of the arcade<br />
games, which was, "Hey, it is advertising along with..." And the<br />
other home producers of the game, there were four or five magazines<br />
already that they were pouring money into. They didn't really want<br />
another one.<br />
<br />
So it was advertising that or just lack of advertising that killed<br />
that off. We just couldn't get it. I think there was still a need<br />
for what we had sort of in a sense proposed to do of objectively<br />
reviewing games and secondly, we're telling people how to play<br />
them.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, it was strategies.<br />
<br />
David: Strategies. It was advertising that we just didn't have, couldn't<br />
get.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:14:28] Atari explored and Atari I think we've covered<br />
pretty well.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Military vehicles, which we talked about.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] Yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So the other magazines, Byte and [inaudible 01:14:45] , was it<br />
rivalry? Was it friendly competition?<br />
<br />
David: Byte, we were in bed together. Not in bed together, but we<br />
published the best of Byte. Creative Computing did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: For awhile.<br />
<br />
David: Well, just one.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. That wasn't that friendly a rivalry. It wasn't that friendly<br />
after awhile.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't friendly once they sold to McGraw Hill, and they sold<br />
early. Then everything was off. We did some joint promotions with<br />
Byte for hardware creative software. We ran the ads for each other<br />
for a short time.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's when McGraw Hill cutoff.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] In a heartbeat. No more of that.<br />
<br />
David: We felt that basically we weren't even competing for the same<br />
advertisers. Just a few, but not really. Certainly, we were not in<br />
direct competition at all with Byte. So that was just kind of all<br />
in the same place and you're going in a hardware direction, we're<br />
going on the software.<br />
When Wayne Green threw this intrigue with his wife and everything<br />
else, lost Byte Magazine. He was fit to be tied. "I'm going to kill<br />
them!" and he started Kilobyte. It wasn't killable. It was Kilobyte<br />
for I don't know how many issues.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not many.<br />
<br />
David: 1000 bytes. [laughter] and a kilobyte, it had a dual meaning there.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: That was a ferocious and very nasty. Oh, horrible rivalry. Somebody<br />
early on forced him not to use the name byte at all.<br />
<br />
Betsy: So it was byte.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: So they changed it to Kilobaud.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Which didn't mean anything.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: No.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So did you have a relationship with Wayne?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Nobody had a relationship with... [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Nobody really had a relationship. I knew him, of course. He was<br />
going his own way. Now the one area actually where we got into more<br />
competition with him than in the magazine itself, because again, he<br />
was trying to be like Byte, hardware oriented and he published 73<br />
magazines so he was basically focusing on the ham radio people, the<br />
do it yourselfers and so on. But they started a software division.<br />
It was pretty good. They had a lot of the same types of software<br />
that we did on cassette tape.<br />
In any event, we really had more of a head to head rivalry on the<br />
software than in the magazine publishing. We never really had<br />
anything to do with the magazine products or books. They also<br />
published some books but more like the magazine hardware type of<br />
thing. We weren't quite as selective, but our book publishing we<br />
did get into things that weren't in the magazine. We published<br />
books with more of a hardware orientation. We had a little broader<br />
line of books than the type of things that we had in the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I don't know if you want to open this can of worms, but you said to<br />
me in an email, "You couldn't find two people whose vision,<br />
philosophy, ethics, and view of business and life was further apart<br />
than Wayne and I." Can you elaborate on that? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was just basically unpleasant, is my take on him. I didn't know<br />
him that well but it was just sort of like he had a chip on his<br />
shoulder and was daring you to knock it off. Wouldn't you say?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You knew him before I did but by the time I arrived on the scene<br />
that was just sort of the general industry perception of him, I<br />
think. It was just stay away from him, leave him alone, he's not<br />
very nice.<br />
<br />
David: Well, one other thing, which we sort of touched on a couple of<br />
times, I'm very trusting. [laughter] Overly so, according to my ex-<br />
wife and I think there would be a couple of examples. Wayne would<br />
walk out of that door, boy, out of sight, 'you're going to do<br />
something to screw him' is what his view would be. He did not trust<br />
anybody.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] And least of all, his ex wife.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: It's the old saying, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean<br />
that somebody isn't out to get you." He thought everyone was out to<br />
get him, everybody. So we were totally philosophically different.<br />
Our ways of doing business were different. I shake hands with you,<br />
we have an agreement. You don't shake hands with Wayne.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't think his employees were ever happy either.<br />
<br />
David: Oh!<br />
<br />
Betsy: You talked to them and it shows. He didn't have like a great...<br />
<br />
David: Rapport.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well it was not. The culture of his organization I don't think was<br />
particularly, I think it was probably permeated with this lack of<br />
trust.<br />
<br />
David: Well, one thing, we had fun. We really did have fun at Creative<br />
Computing. Perhaps some of the editorial staff, too much. There was<br />
one point where Betsy had to away their...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well they were all young guys. Some of them even still in high<br />
school, they would play games for hours and hours and hours, long<br />
after the reviews were done. It was one, self-contained thing that<br />
played football, and they played it for hours. I had to take it<br />
away from them. Like "don't make me be your mother"<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there any drug culture at all? If you read [inaudible 01:22:17]<br />
and he was cocaine and high everyday and popped...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not that we knew of. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: The East coast was quite different.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No there was nothing, really. I don't think so. In fact, my client<br />
John Anderson and Peter Fee, they were actually kind of protective<br />
of me in a lot of ways. I can remember being in John's office and<br />
they were talking about a movie or something like that. John said,<br />
"No, you wouldn't like this movie, don't go to this movie." That<br />
kind of thing, they were funny guys. They just kept laughing. David<br />
Lubar. They were free spirits but they were very funny, talented<br />
guys.<br />
<br />
David: He is coming out with a line of children's books, weird, weird<br />
stuff. The last one, something about the lawn mower weenies. He has<br />
a line of 6 or 8, and they're all little short stories. Some of<br />
them were adaptations of stuff that almost got published in<br />
Creative Computing, probably some of them did. Lubar is a funny<br />
guy. When he left and went to work for one of the video gaming<br />
companies, his first big successful game was "Worm Wars." You were<br />
like, "Worm Wars?" [laughs]<br />
Other people are fighting real serious warrior and you are fighting<br />
with worms. We just had a different kind of culture, a lot of fun.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Jonny Anderson went to work for A plus in San Francisco. He was one<br />
of the five people killed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1986.<br />
He was in a car and a piece of the building fell on the car. He was<br />
a really funny guy.<br />
<br />
David: We did not have a serious business culture.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, we had this great big room with a bunch of tables set up around<br />
the edges, in the middle. It was kind of like that, nowhere near as<br />
neat.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I will clean that up for you.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] Just tangles of wires, and we had to have one of every<br />
kind of computer so we can test all the software, and this one<br />
would be running this kind of peripheral, and it was like a young<br />
guys dream job.<br />
<br />
David: You commented yesterday about how we had a bunch of high school,<br />
not quite, but still...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I said that they were in their early 20s but they basically had the<br />
maturity of high school students, they needed a little bit of<br />
mothering. But I wasn't that myself. They were just really nice<br />
guys, we did a good job hiring those kids.<br />
<br />
David: When you talk about the Atari cultures and some of the others,<br />
where every Friday some of these companies have parties, that kind<br />
of thing. We had an annual party, a picnic. We didn't need weekly<br />
parties and stuff to let you have fun because that stuff was going<br />
on every day, not really partying but playing the games and<br />
bantering and everything else.<br />
As they say, at Washington, a real efficient business culture.<br />
Heck, I didn't work for Digital Equipment, which was still a pretty<br />
relaxed place, but AT&T which was anything but. This is as far away<br />
from that kind of corporate culture as you can get, but it worked.<br />
Didn't make a lot of money, but it worked.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:26:58]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. And I think they appreciated it because they weren't making<br />
tons of money either, but they were having a lot of fun. They<br />
enjoyed going to work, they really enjoyed it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Speaking of Kindle, I've done it but haven't told anybody yet that<br />
best of Creative Computing too is now available on Kindle. And I<br />
have been working backwards. [crosstalk] I just had it on sale.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I haven't publicized it yet for sale.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They won't let you do. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah, I think they will have two.<br />
<br />
David: Did you do that through Amazon? How do you convert is to Kindle?<br />
I scan them and then I do CRM and I use Elance or utilize some<br />
service in India that converts it back to ASCII, and then they<br />
convert it into an E-book from there. It's a lot of work, I want it<br />
done well, and I want it to be super awesome. And they just<br />
[inaudible 01:28:40] , like we were talking about before.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Outsourcing and stuff. But I can do it myself but that would take<br />
way too long. So I just try to do the quality control [inaudible<br />
01:28:49] . It's not perfect but better than nothing.<br />
<br />
David: I have reached the point where with my Dodge restoration book, that<br />
yes, many of the borders around the pictures are terrible, they're<br />
hand drawn and so on. But I'm not going to bother to re-do that, I<br />
just want take the book, get it into some sort of machine readable<br />
format, PDF or something. [inaudible 01:29:24] somebody that can...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah, I can get you off with that. We can then figure it out.<br />
<br />
David: I found one extra one that I can cut up.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That will help a lot. [inaudible 01:29:37] . If you want to sell a<br />
PDF of it, that would be up in couple of day. That's easy, but a<br />
searchable Kindle version that takes longer.<br />
<br />
David: I don't want a Kindle version because people want to print out<br />
something that they can...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Take out to the garage<br />
<br />
David: When people slide under the vehicle they have it there, "Oh, OK<br />
this is what I should be looking for."<br />
<br />
Kevin: If you scan it and upload it to Amazon, even create space from<br />
[inaudible 01:30:06] company, then there could actually be another<br />
book, that looks pretty identical to the first one. We will figure<br />
out.<br />
Do you [inaudible 01:30:23] ? But are you familiar with...?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Are there any?<br />
<br />
Kevin: There are but they are very different than Creative.<br />
<br />
David: Somebody out there said, "What did you read today?" The only<br />
magazines that I will occasionally pick up in the computer field<br />
are mostly from England, Internet magazines, well there are<br />
several, which is sort of interesting that the dominant Internet<br />
magazines come from England, but they do.<br />
If I want to do something, and I haven't lately, but I wanted to<br />
get into doing something different or interactive or something with<br />
my website. I'd pick up one of those magazines and kind of have<br />
same kind of thing that Creative used to publish. Here is a code to<br />
do it in Pearl or HTML, whatever.<br />
<br />
I converted all of my website, quite a while ago, to XHTML from old<br />
HTML. I did not like any of the programs that generate web pages,<br />
mainly because...Well, today its probably OK, but I felt that<br />
earlier on, they were very inefficient. You'd have this much code<br />
for something and XHTML would write it in five lines.<br />
<br />
My old-fashioned [inaudible 01:32:23] said, "You know what, the<br />
interpreter or compiler or whatever, has to go through a lot of<br />
that just to pick out what is going to be displayed." My web pages<br />
are very compact and short. They are all XHTML, none of that is<br />
extra [inaudible 01:32:41] style pages and everything else.<br />
<br />
Anyway, so that's what I'll pick up a magazine for. I'm was doing a<br />
little bit of programming in Pearl and then I said, "No. You know<br />
what, I can get routines that I can download and I don't have to<br />
learn it myself. I learned enough to know that I don't want your<br />
Pearl program." [laughs] Or what is the other one? I don't know.<br />
I'm right at the point now where I'm wanting to do some more things<br />
that I can't, so I'll probably purchase some more computer<br />
magazines and learn about it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Has anyone talked to you about the purchase of PC by Davis?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is a big story.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: She was involved.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was involved. There was a magazine called PC. I was in San<br />
Francisco.<br />
<br />
Kevin: PC magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: PC Magazine, right. And, there was a guy named Tony Gold and there<br />
was somebody else that I can't remember. There was Tony Gold and<br />
this Mr. X started this magazine and they hired...David Banell will<br />
probably tell you all, I don't know all the details but I'm sure he<br />
has it engraved in his brain.<br />
They hired David Banell to run it and I guess several other people,<br />
and my understanding is, that they told them they were going to<br />
give them a piece of the action, they weren't going to pay them<br />
very much but you're all part owners and everything, but nobody<br />
ever wrote it down.<br />
<br />
So when Ziff Davis approached Tony Gold and Mr. X and wanted to buy<br />
the magazine, and the guys said, "Oh yeah, sure," and they sold it<br />
to him and all these people that were working for them said, "Well,<br />
what about us. We're part owners too." But there was no proof of<br />
it. So Ziff bought it, and they were right in the middle, just<br />
about to go to press with an issue and they got word that it had<br />
been purchased by Ziff.<br />
<br />
So David Banell took just about the entire staff and they walked<br />
out and went across town and started PC World. Apparently their<br />
lawyers said, "Don't take anything with you." So they just walked<br />
out and left the offices as they were, and Ziff, who now had a<br />
magazine to get out and no one to do it, sent me out to San<br />
Francisco for a couple of weeks and there was like an editorial<br />
assistant and a couple of freelance writers, were the only people<br />
left.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So this is when you became the interim.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is how I become the editorial director of PC. So I basically<br />
went out there and walked into this office and had to pull together<br />
their issue and get it off to the printer. They had a big dummy on<br />
the wall where everthing...<br />
<br />
Kevin: They lay all the...<br />
<br />
Betsy: They lay all the impositions where all the pages and the stories<br />
were going to go and they moved everything around. [laughs] But<br />
they couldn't resist.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That is awesome.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This one guy, whose name I wish I could remember. Barry Owen,<br />
worked with me, and we were able to get it off to the printer and<br />
then pack everything up and send it back to New York and then they<br />
hired Barry Owen, he moved to New York and he eventually become the<br />
editor, because that was who they had.<br />
I was sort of the editorial director for a while and they said<br />
that, "If you were going to do this, you would have to come to the<br />
city. We are going to really set up an office here and make it<br />
real." And I said, "No, I am not going to drive into the city every<br />
day or take the train or the bus or anything." It was a interesting<br />
story and we were getting much more interesting version of it from<br />
David Barnell, who was there. [laughs]<br />
<br />
And in the mean time, they were all starting up PC World and taking<br />
all of their freelancers and trying to make it as difficult as<br />
possible for PC. That was a big rivalry, obviously.<br />
<br />
David: And then it created a couple of months of problems at creative too,<br />
because my editor was gone. I had really gotten very dependent to<br />
rely on her for so many things. "I got to edit this myself." And<br />
then the whole question mark was, OK if PC magazine, is she can<br />
stay with it. It was a time of uncertainty.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm sure it was a bad career move.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. But PC magazine still exist.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, exactly. I don't know if I would have existed if I had to<br />
commute to New York, that's a nasty commute. Millions of people do<br />
it but, I just didn't want to be one of them. I didn't mean to<br />
interrupt, so back to you.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What are you most proud of, or everything you have done?<br />
<br />
David: OK, that's obviously not a one word answer. Proud is, I am not<br />
crazy about it. I guess the fact that I continued to hear from<br />
people that said, "Hey, I got my start in computing from Basic<br />
computer games or Creative Computing," or something that I had my<br />
hand in, that makes me feel pretty good.<br />
You have a long term, or longer term influence that just what you<br />
do at the time, it's living on. It's not living on forever. Basic<br />
isn't going to live on forever. But I think the idea that having<br />
some positive influence on other people, on their lives, on their<br />
careers, that's a good.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You helped send people into the computer science field.<br />
<br />
David: And you know the specific individual accomplishments. Yeah, I wrote<br />
a couple of programs that are probably in some cases, maybe not the<br />
program but the routines, are still in use. That's minor compared<br />
to having an influence on people and their career and their<br />
outlook, their future. That's way more important. "OK so I wrote a<br />
great algorithm, so what."<br />
<br />
Kevin: And you really think it's the same algorithm that's being used in<br />
Google maps and...<br />
<br />
David: Portions of it, yeah. But that is minor. I look back and I say,<br />
"Almost anything that I wrote in the last 30-40 years, if I were<br />
doing it today, I would have done it a little differently, but I<br />
didn't know then what I know now." So there's no one thing I could<br />
say, "Oh, that was a really great article, or great insight," or<br />
something. Anything can be improved upon.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sure. That's what disappoints me about computer magazines today is<br />
I don't think that it seems like children going to be able to go.<br />
It's not going to motivate anybody to do anything, other than use<br />
Word version 18 or whatever. There's no Basic programs to type<br />
anymore and it's not exciting.<br />
[cross talk]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Well, [inaudible 01:42:31] was mentioning that at breakfast,<br />
oh gosh that was just yesterday.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was yesterday [laughs] .<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] That kids today don't have any feeling about, or I should<br />
say knowledge about the real basics of bits. What is a bit?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: Nobody knows anymore. He wanted to find some little simple piece of<br />
hardware. Really, I guess he has, that every kid when they're in<br />
the 5th or 6th grade will be exposed to this so they'll have some<br />
concept of what bits are all about. Are you ever going to get that<br />
into schools today? No. So anyway, it's just kind of, hopefully<br />
there's been some long term influence.<br />
And what I'm doing now even, which is mainly developing bible<br />
studies for...well, I mostly have guys that have had a drug or<br />
alcohol addiction problem coming to this. They're in a rescue<br />
mission. I'm hoping that these studies can have a little bit of an<br />
influence on the direction of their lives. They're a positive<br />
influence on where they go from here. So it's kind of, people more<br />
than a specific thing or whatever.<br />
<br />
[pause]<br />
<br />
Those are terrible copies.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They are copies. These are from the scans. I was printing scans and<br />
I wasn't trying to make them pretty. Just for my reasons, it was<br />
quick and dirty. I could've bumped the contrast and stuff.<br />
<br />
David: There's Carl.<br />
[pause]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do have anything left, like how many subscribers you had over time?<br />
Is that data around anymore? How many newsstand copies you had? I<br />
assume that is a lot.<br />
<br />
David: OK, maximum, I think we mentioned that. We hit just about a half a<br />
million before Ziff killed it. Then, they gave people a choice of<br />
three magazines that they expected to continue to publish, PC,<br />
Apple's A+, or Mac User.<br />
I'm guessing that most people went with PC. One of the reasons<br />
actually was Ziff's rationale at that point was, PC World had<br />
really grown a lot and the circulation base of PC World and PC were<br />
very close. They were both about a half million. PC might have had<br />
a small lead.<br />
<br />
Then, by killing Creative Computing and rolling all of those<br />
subscribers, there was some overlap. Certainly, there were some<br />
subscribers that got both magazines. You probably had a quarter of<br />
a million additional subscribers into PC. All of the sudden, they<br />
go to advertise, "We've got three-quarters of a million and PC<br />
World only has half a million."<br />
<br />
That was when PC had a huge growth spurt. You know, they started<br />
publishing those telephone-book-thick issues.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I would think that it probably still holds the record for the<br />
largest magazine ever published, whenever the issue was that they<br />
published it, it was their biggest one. Certainly magazines aren't<br />
getting bigger now. They didn't continue to increase in size after<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: Then they started publishing it twice a month. The nudge that the<br />
subscriber base at Creative, gave to PC really, separated them<br />
completely from PC World. They had their reasons.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. This is a chart of the page count of Creative Computing over<br />
its life. It's not a question, I just made a chart. Every December<br />
there's a peak for the big December issue. Right at the end it<br />
just, all of the sudden, stopped.<br />
<br />
David: Well, that's when Ziff had decided to kill it, which was almost a<br />
year before. They basically let us publish for another eight or<br />
nine months after they had made the decision.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was a lot of back and forth. Are they going to kill it? Are<br />
they not going to kill it?<br />
<br />
David: They weren't promoting, no subscription promotion. They were saving<br />
their money. If you don't promote the subscriptions, you're not<br />
going to get them.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is page count.<br />
<br />
David: It was advertising.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:48:59]<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't actually subscriber base didn't drop them. That's cool.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just thought I'd do a comparison, even though that's not really<br />
what I'm doing here. In the beginning, you guys were bimonthly and<br />
they were monthly. I couldn't know how to do it accurately. Their<br />
page count's actually higher, because they were doing twice as<br />
much. I don't have all the data here. You guys tended to publish<br />
larger issues than "Kilobyte?"<br />
<br />
David: It was so dependent upon advertising. You got some magazines, they<br />
would run 80, 90 percent advertising, if they could. In some<br />
special interest fields, you can get away with that, because people<br />
are actually buying the magazine for the advertising, not for the<br />
editorial content.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [inaudible 01:50:02] , a good example.<br />
<br />
David: That's exactly right. Even what the guys that bought Military<br />
Vehicles, they just went over so heavily to...I always believe that<br />
you should have at least one-third editorial content, preferably<br />
more. They dropped down to 20 percent to edit.<br />
<br />
Kevin: There was one issue, the 10th anniversary issue, I don't mean to be<br />
picking on Wayne here. There was this quote he happened to say,<br />
which I thought was really interesting to me, I wanted to get your<br />
take on it. He said, this is in 1984, "A computer system doesn't<br />
really stand a prayer anymore unless there's at least one<br />
dedicated, independent magazine for its users."<br />
<br />
David: Wayne said that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wayne said that. Is that true? At the time, would you have agreed<br />
with that?<br />
<br />
David: In '84? Again, you've got to look at where we were in the cycle at<br />
that point. The cycle was then, there were more computers dying off<br />
than there were new ones being released. Standardization had come<br />
in really. You've got the IBM PC, and everybody's producing a PC<br />
clone. Apple kept going, and Atari, and Commodore attempted to.<br />
If you were to start a computer company at that point, with a new<br />
computer, yeah, you'd need something to give your user base<br />
something to do with it, more than just what the manufacturer was<br />
selling. So, that's probably accurate. What do you think?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, I think it's accurate. That's what people started to expect.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. Another chord of the same issue which we've kind of touched<br />
on from Tom Dwyer. This is in 1984. He's saying, "Computer<br />
magazines used to have personality [laughter] and now they don't."<br />
Now, they really don't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They really don't!<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think they still have personality in form but now it's just<br />
inconsistent.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Who was Tom Dwyer? I don't remember him.<br />
<br />
David: Tom Dwyer? He was at University of Pittsburgh. He came up with all<br />
those neat applications. He and Margo...He had the best basic<br />
primer of anybody, in fact the only one that both Kemeny and Kurtz<br />
endorsed outside of their own material. He had really written some<br />
good Basic books.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm just finishing up here. The Internet says you were born in<br />
1939. Is that right?<br />
<br />
David: Yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Where were you born?<br />
<br />
David: New York, New York.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent.<br />
<br />
David: I was born in the hospital that my father had a hand in designing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Really?<br />
<br />
David: He was an architect up until the Recession. I think he, perhaps,<br />
designed the restrooms but he wasn't the...<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: When were you two married?<br />
<br />
Betsy: 1988. 25 years ago.<br />
<br />
David: June 18, 1988.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What's your last name now?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mine?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ahl.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I tried keeping this professional thing and it was just way too<br />
confusing, since that really wasn't my name anyway. That was my<br />
first husband's name, and then just...this is way too complicated.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My wife kept her maiden name and now she wishes she hadn't. It's<br />
just confusing. It just made sense to do.<br />
<br />
Betsy: If had been my maiden name, I might have, but it really wasn't.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What haven't I asked you that I should have?<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] We kind of were noodling it around last night and said,<br />
"Man, the guy's thorough."<br />
<br />
Betsy: You the most prepared interviewer ever.<br />
<br />
David: I jotted down a couple of notes. Nope.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Got everything?<br />
<br />
David: What's your thinking? Because originally you were talking to me<br />
about covering Wayne's magazines and so on.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My original thought, when I had put no thought into it, was that it<br />
would be half about Wayne's magazine and half about Creative. First<br />
of all, after talking to him, I thought there's not enough to do<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: Did you talk to Wayne?<br />
<br />
Kevin: I talked to Wayne.<br />
<br />
David: Well that's good to know, right? Carl Helmers didn't know if Wayne<br />
was still alive.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He's still alive.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's true. We asked Carl Helmers if Wayne was still alive and he<br />
was [inaudible 01:56:06] .<br />
<br />
David: Actually, there was another guy up there that published a computer<br />
magazine. What the heck was the name of it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Who are you talking about?<br />
<br />
David: Up in New Hampshire, Peterborough. It was one of the earlier would-<br />
be competitors to Datamation. So, it was much earlier.<br />
He was absolutely totally convinced about the Kennedy assassination<br />
and published a computer analysis of all the photos and everything<br />
else. Every single issue of the magazine had this stuff. He and<br />
Wayne were on the same wavelength on that. You ask Wayne about the<br />
conspiracy. [laughs] You'll get an earful.<br />
<br />
Kevin: In answer to your question. First, it was going to be the two, and<br />
then that happened. Also my wife said, "If you're doing two, then<br />
it's going to seem like a compare and contrast thing." That's not<br />
what I want to do.<br />
Now I'm thinking that this will be a project about the earliest<br />
computer magazines, the first computer magazines. That way, I can,<br />
whatever, four or five chapters. One on Creative, and maybe Byte.<br />
I'm meeting with the editor of Byte in a couple of weeks at an<br />
event, maybe Interface Age or one of the other ones.<br />
<br />
David: If you can find Bob Jones, that would be an interesting contrast.<br />
He was Interface Age. He had a different perspective on a lot of<br />
things, and I had a lot of respect for him. He just didn't sell at<br />
the right time. Too bad. Bob Jones was a very serious, good guy.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Who were the other early people? Dr. Dobbs? I don't know what...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, Dr. Dobbs...<br />
<br />
David: Jim Warren! Oh my goodness. That would give you another perspective<br />
altogether.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's, again, the California...<br />
<br />
David: Jim Warren and Bob Albrecht are tied together very closely. They're<br />
both in sort of in the alternative lifestyle. I don't know what<br />
you'd call it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That probably had Friday afternoon pot parties. [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Oh, boy. Did they ever! Yes, yes. Jim also was the one that started<br />
the West Coast computer fairs. He's a very capable guy. Dr. Dobb's<br />
journal was in a sense, well, you've probably seen it. You have,<br />
right? OK, so you know.<br />
That's really low level programming rather than higher languages.<br />
We're talking about machine languages, assembly language,<br />
programming, and there. It was sort of like Microsystems was to<br />
Byte. Microsystems, for the really serious hardware guy. Dr. Dobbs<br />
was for the really serious programmer, compared to Creative which<br />
was for people who just wanted to type something in that would<br />
work.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:59:35] basic right. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Dr. Dobbs. That was a totally different [inaudible 01:59:43]<br />
competitor.<br />
<br />
David: We didn't compete at all. I had a view that we competed at all with<br />
them; they may have thought we did but I didn't think so.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did they even have advertising?<br />
<br />
David: Oh yeah, actually they did, and it kept going for a long time<br />
because it was a small little nitch magazine. But, yeah, Jim Warren<br />
would be an interesting guy, very interesting guy early on. I don't<br />
know about Albert because you say he published more tabloid<br />
newspapers. I don't know if they ever really published any magazine<br />
size thing or not. Probably not, but it would give me a totally<br />
different perspective because they are coming from the west coast,<br />
looser or whatever.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That sounded pretty loose.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah nothing compared to that.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think he was sort of in rebellion when he started working at<br />
Creator Computing because he was coming off of AT&T where he had to<br />
wear a suit to work every day. So the first thing he did was burn<br />
his suits and wear t-shirt and jeans way before anybody was doing<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: I went extremely in the other direction, yeah I did, but who else<br />
real early. Personal computing which I think David Barnell somehow<br />
involved in it at some point in there. Because they moved from the<br />
west coast to New Jersey, they were bought by...who was that? It<br />
was mostly a company that published things like hardware age and<br />
advertiser-driven magazines. What was the name?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, gosh. Begins with an 'H'.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Halshep<br />
<br />
David: No. Anyway, when they brought personal computing...I think Barnell<br />
maybe even started it, and then they moved it to New Jersey, and<br />
then David said "I'm not going to New Jersey. I'm a west coast<br />
guy," or whatever. And then, they changed the whole thing totally.<br />
That's why I said they're one of the ones where they were so<br />
totally advertiser driven. A press release is a product review, as<br />
far as they were concerned.<br />
They had some interesting stuff. They were a competitor only in<br />
name, but also because they got the advertising. "I think I'm going<br />
to advertise." "Oh! We're going to publish a wonderful review! Give<br />
it to us." And so they were early, and they made money. There were<br />
a bunch of flash-in-the-pan magazines that lasted 2 or 3 or maybe 6<br />
issues, but nobody...<br />
<br />
Kevin: But only one in seven made it, so...<br />
<br />
Betsy: One in seven, right?<br />
<br />
David: That's right, exactly. I can't remember the name of some of these<br />
ones, but there was a very successful big magazine that published<br />
all Apple...reviews of Apple stuff. What was that one? Apple by<br />
themselves spawned I'd guess half a dozen magazines.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Inquest, and Insider, and Apple...a bunch of others there.<br />
<br />
David: Right. Actually, there's one that I can't think of the name of, it<br />
turned out, it was bigger and thicker and creative. They were<br />
publishing a lot of stuff, but again, it would all be positive and<br />
so they really killed us on getting advertising. We had been a<br />
publisher of Apple material for a while. Then all these others came<br />
along. That one, whatever it was, was really took a lot of<br />
advertising from us. I'll think about it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You'll remember.<br />
<br />
David: I'll remember some of this. When it all settled out, you came back<br />
down to eight or nine, but the ones we're talking about...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Well, at one point there was 200.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I think that's correct.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You are probably counting newsletters..<br />
<br />
Kevin: Probably industry-specific stuff and niche stuff but still, you<br />
went from one to 200, 10 years ago.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. That's true.</div>Mauryhttps://www.computingpioneers.com/index.php?title=Dave_Ahl_and_Betsy_Ahl&diff=142Dave Ahl and Betsy Ahl2019-09-25T18:23:26Z<p>Maury: added note that this is obviously Isaac Asimov</p>
<hr />
<div>This is a transcript of an audio interview. This transcript may contain errors - if you're using this material for research, etc. please verify with the original recorded interview.<br />
<br />
Source: ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast<br />
<br />
Source URL: http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-280-david-and-betsy-ahl-creative-computing-magazine<br />
<br />
Interviewer: Kevin Savetz<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm interested in how you guys got together. Was it some sort of<br />
office romance? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It started before then. I was working at Drew University and I was<br />
dating the computer science professor. He invited Dave...he was a<br />
subscriber to Creative Computing. I can remember being at his house<br />
and picking up a copy of this magazine and thinking, "Creative<br />
Computing," and laughing. "What kind of a title is that?"<br />
He invited Dave to come speak to one of his classes. While he was<br />
there, he said, "I should stop by your placement office. We're<br />
starting to expand. I'm looking for some people." Right? Am I<br />
getting this right? I was looking for other opportunities, so I<br />
sent him my resume. Many months later, he hired me.<br />
<br />
David: She still smarts about that.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: I interviewed her in, I don't know, April or so.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You interviewed me on April 17th and you did not hire me until<br />
August 1st. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: A lot was going on that year. That was '78.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was a really long time after that that we got married. We didn't<br />
get married until 10 years later.<br />
<br />
David: Actually, I had hired Betsy as our business manager. That's what I<br />
really needed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Not a wife, then.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not wife then, either.<br />
<br />
David: Not at that point. We had 2 buildings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had one.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, well I was looking for...<br />
<br />
Betsy: My first job was to find another building.<br />
<br />
David: We were expanding like crazy. In fact, one of the reasons that I<br />
didn't hire her sooner, I had just left my day job at AT&T, and was<br />
facing up to, "Oh my gosh, can I afford to take a salary out of<br />
Creative Computing?" Yes, we had expanded a lot, but can I even pay<br />
myself, much less other senior people? I left AT&T in July, and<br />
finally by August it became clear I really have to get this<br />
administration end of things under control.<br />
The editorial was OK. I had enough outside contributors that were<br />
going along with what we were doing in-house that I could continue<br />
with that, but it was the other end of things where we really had<br />
some problems. So then we go to 2 separate facilities. One was a 2<br />
family house on the other side of Morristown, and the other was a<br />
converted greenhouse garage, which is where I started. So, Betsy<br />
was in the greenhouse garage where I had the administration side of<br />
things, and I was at the house and that was the editorial and art<br />
and...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Software.<br />
<br />
David: ...putting the magazine together. Software, right. So she would<br />
come over from her place to my office every day or two just to let<br />
me know what's going on, and we'd get together. But it wasn't until<br />
I don't' remember the date when Betsy was saying, "Well, I'd like<br />
to get into..."<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well I had spent all my summers in college and two thereafter<br />
working at our local newspaper, writing editing and putting the<br />
whole thing together, so I think I more or less just said, "We've<br />
got all these new product announcements that we don't have anybody<br />
to do, why don't I just do them?" So, I started out doing the press<br />
releases and things.<br />
<br />
David: Her newspaper experience was first in high school covering sports.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, I started out covering the unpopular sports as a senior in<br />
high school. Because they didn't want a girl to write about the<br />
important sports. So they let the girl write about the unimportant<br />
sports, which turned out to be the winning sports, at this small<br />
New Jersey high school. That's how I started.<br />
<br />
David: And then at the newspaper, you started by writing obituaries,<br />
right?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well, it's one of the things I did. I always wanted to be a Spanish<br />
teacher. I didn't know anything about this. So, I got this sports-<br />
writing job by way of a babysitting job, I babysat for the<br />
publisher's kids and on the way home one night he said to me, "We<br />
always have a boy from the school who writes about the sports for<br />
the paper, do you know anybody?" and I said, "Well, I know the guy<br />
who did it last year, and if he could do it, I could do it."<br />
So I did that and didn't' think much more of it. Went off to<br />
college, came back over spring break, and ran into the guy in the<br />
grocery store and he said, "Would you like a job working for the<br />
paper this summer?" And I said sure. I had no idea whether he<br />
wanted me to sweep the floors or what, but it was a job so I took<br />
it. It was in the editorial department.<br />
<br />
And I learned from some very serious journalists who had worked for<br />
a very good paper, the Newark Evening News, which was a very<br />
serious paper that probably was too serious and folded, probably in<br />
the mid '60s, but these people were really good journalists and<br />
they taught me a lot.<br />
<br />
I think it was that first year, about halfway through the summer<br />
the publisher was on vacation, the editor was going to go on<br />
vacation when the publisher came back and the publisher, the day he<br />
was supposed to come back had appendicitis, had to have an<br />
appendectomy which back in those days was a much bigger deal than<br />
it is now. The editor said, "Well, I'm leaving." [laughs] And there<br />
I was. I was running this little paper.<br />
<br />
David: So I figured if you can run a newspaper, even though it's just a<br />
summer job, she could do a lot for us. Well, Betsy continued to<br />
handle the administrative things for really quite awhile and, as<br />
she said, probably was initially doing new product releases. Cause<br />
you get just tons of it over the transom and from these smaller<br />
companies...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So you'd like get a press release and then you'd rewrite it, that<br />
sort of things?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well we had a new product section and it was a format, a style for<br />
them, for each one. If they sent a photo, do a photo, a cut line<br />
for it. Basically what I do is let them pile up and then sort<br />
through and figure out which ones were worthy of attention. And<br />
then it was kind of just filler. They ran in one column and when<br />
you came to the end of the magazine whatever you had leftover you<br />
would fill in with these.<br />
<br />
David: And the thing is that the companies that were putting out these<br />
press releases, this was back in the, what '76, '77 or so, tiny<br />
little companies. They had no marketing expertise so they were<br />
sending us, in some cases, not quite handwritten but pretty crude.<br />
So it took some editing and some real work to make them readable.<br />
And then, as Betsy said, you had to guess. OK, which one, this is a<br />
significant product but is this guy going to be able to make this<br />
company go or is it just going to flop? And we tried to be<br />
responsible to the readers. Reporting on things that weren't just a<br />
wonderful great new idea but something that they were going to have<br />
on the market that was going to get some support and everything<br />
else. So anyway. That was a long story of how we got together.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I still don't know how you got together.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We were working in an office about as large as this banquette here<br />
together. Because when we first started working together we didn't<br />
have this other house. So it was the two of us. You had an actual<br />
desk I believe. I had a table that he had made out of particle<br />
board. Yeah it was fancy and I had to put duct tape along it<br />
because the edge was making holes in my clothes.<br />
So we worked in this office back to back, sort of got to know each<br />
other, and became friends, little by little. He said to me, when<br />
you're looking for this building, it would be a good thing if there<br />
was a place for me to live because I'm in the process of getting<br />
separated from my wife. Which it turned out you didn't do right<br />
away but eventually you did. Right?<br />
<br />
David: Well, it was three months later. That was right away in a sense.<br />
What precipitated that was we had a woman that was working in the<br />
mailroom and she got in cahoots with somebody in the accounting<br />
department and they started working a little embezzlement.<br />
<br />
Kevin: This was at the [inaudible 00:13:49] ?<br />
<br />
David: Pardon?<br />
<br />
Betsy: At Creative Computing.<br />
<br />
David: No, at Creative Computing. This was just after Betsy was hired. In<br />
fact, they had it going on before and I mean they were very good at<br />
it. What they did is they set up a bank account in the name of<br />
Creative Computing in the next county. And they would take very<br />
fourth or fifth check and it might be a subscription, it might be<br />
paying for an ad or something...<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was mostly the advertisers.<br />
<br />
David: Well it was both. And then they put that into their bank account.<br />
And then the one that was in the accounting department would mark<br />
the thing as paid.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, she didn't. That was her mistake.<br />
<br />
David: Well, she didn't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because that wasn't her job.<br />
<br />
David: Well she blew one. In any event it was my advertising manager that<br />
we had sent an overdue notice to one of the advertisers.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Apple.<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Apple. It was Regis McKenna, it was Apple's agency.<br />
<br />
David: And they said, we paid that. And a woman said, well send me proof.<br />
And they did. And we looked at the bank where it was deposited and<br />
then we called in local detective, police department. And they got<br />
the bank records and said, "How much do you think this was?" Well<br />
no they didn't say that, they said, this is probably a lot more<br />
than you thought.<br />
And it turned out to be well over $100,000. And our total annual,<br />
not even profit at that point...well, the gross was just about a<br />
million at that point, not quite, but close to it. So $100,000 was<br />
a big, big chunk 10 percent.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When was this?<br />
<br />
David: '78. And, so, obviously we fired these two. And then the court<br />
finally, they determined that they had also, one of them had been<br />
involved in welfare fraud and other stuff and the court ordered<br />
them to pay it back at the rate of, I don't know...<br />
<br />
Betsy: 47 cents a week.<br />
<br />
David: It was some tiny amount.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 00:16:26]<br />
[laughter and crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Course they'll never pay anything.<br />
<br />
David: And we got one payment you know, and that was it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And she was ordered to do public service. Like who wants someone<br />
doing public service for them who's done something like that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Magazines back then, probably any business but, they were a hotbed<br />
of intrigue. You had that happened and then the whole Bike Magazine<br />
getting stolen.<br />
<br />
David: So Betsy actually, in response to that brought, in response to the<br />
embezzlement brought in her Sister-in-Law Bobbi, and I think your<br />
mother too...<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Bobbi's mother.<br />
<br />
David: Bobbi's mother, OK. But one to...<br />
<br />
Betsy: My mother in law. I was a widow at the time.<br />
<br />
David: ...do some of the accounting because we didn't have an accountant<br />
and wanted just to help out and make some calls to advertisers and<br />
say can you speed up your payment a little bit and also calls to<br />
people that we owed money to, hey we're going to be maybe a little<br />
late. It really didn't look good. That was just a huge amount of<br />
money and so we had to stretch things out and hope that the growth<br />
continued so we could recover some of this.<br />
Betsy really rescued us there. It was amazing. We finally did<br />
stretch things out. What precipitated the separation with my wife<br />
at the time is I went home and told her this had happened and<br />
everything.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Thanksgiving weekend. Day before Thanksgiving.<br />
<br />
David: The day before Thanksgiving is when we got all the information from<br />
the police department and I went home to my wife and she said, "You<br />
dumb...," well I won't repeat the whole thing but, "You are so<br />
stupid. You trust people." "Yes, I trust people." "You shouldn't<br />
trust people like that. Get out of the house. I can't put up with<br />
this anymore." So it was a good thing we had a two family house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had this two family house.<br />
<br />
David: I moved into the bedroom on one side.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He had his office on one side of the top floor in the back bedroom<br />
and his bedroom in the back bedroom on the other side and his<br />
kitchen. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is this the place I was reading about where your bedroom was above<br />
the kitchen?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yes. The Ted Nelson.<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, a lot of things precipitated. Because of that, we had to<br />
make some other changes on personnel and move some people around. I<br />
think after that then Betsy took more of a role in the editorial<br />
end of things.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Stayed there until the bitter end.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The bitter end. Actually, I was there after he was gone.<br />
<br />
David: That's true.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ziff continued to pay me several months after they closed the<br />
magazine to stay behind and clean up because we have a 75,000<br />
square foot building. Make sure that we don't dispose of the<br />
hardware and just basically get it ready.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When you quit at the phone company to start a magazine, that must<br />
have been scary.<br />
<br />
David: I had left Digital Equipment in 1974, and I'm sure you read the<br />
whole rationale behind that, and joined AT&T in marketing,<br />
educational marketing. Same thing I was doing at DEC but obviously<br />
marketing different products to a different mix of customers. AT&T,<br />
back then and perhaps today, they had a real formula that you're in<br />
a job for two years and then they rotate you out or they put you in<br />
another job.<br />
The way AT&T works is they have certain steps. There's a manager<br />
and then a director level. There are levels, one, two, three, four,<br />
five. The operating companies, like Pacific Bell and so on, have<br />
similar steps that are considered a half step below AT&T. What they<br />
do is they rotate you out to an operating company, a half step<br />
promotion, they rotate you back into AT&T, now you're a full step.<br />
You never get a full step in one company.<br />
<br />
They had offered me a rotation to Southern Bell. Birmingham,<br />
Alabama. "No. No." Then probably two or three months later said<br />
we've got an opening in Wisconsin Tel. "Oh my gosh. Come on,<br />
something sensible." I turned them down, which was bad. You can't<br />
turn down. If you turn down three you might as well retire.<br />
<br />
The third one was, in a sense, it wasn't a promotion but it was a<br />
sideways job jump within AT&T itself. I went from having the<br />
education group, which was about eight people, to corporate<br />
communications, which is about 100 people and a huge budget. I was<br />
responsible for all of the marketing communications for the whole<br />
Bell system. Not advertising.<br />
<br />
We had seminar centers, put out all kinds of educational pamphlets,<br />
even a magazine for our customers on how to use the equipment. I<br />
was doing that. It's a big job. It's a 50 hour a week job. Creative<br />
Computing was halfway down the block. I'd go there at lunch time,<br />
see how things were doing.<br />
<br />
As I said a little bit ago, when it looked like we were going to<br />
hit a million dollars I said I've got to get serious about this.<br />
That's when I resigned from AT&T. That was probably the first, I<br />
shouldn't say the first, but that was a major problem with my wife<br />
at that time. You're leaving AT&T? You're leaving all those<br />
benefits? What are you doing, you idiot? We were on the downward<br />
spiral at that point and then the embezzlement just sealed the<br />
whole thing.<br />
<br />
Leaving any job for an unknown thing like you started a little<br />
company and you leave your day job. You're making a real<br />
commitment.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Even once you were at Creative full time, it looks like you did a<br />
lot of everything. You were writing, you were doing programming,<br />
you were being the editor, the publisher and the editor which is<br />
not done anymore.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. I don't know. You can correct me. I don't think I was a<br />
control freak.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. You had Phil Ellenberg. You had just hired Phil Ellenberg as<br />
the advertising manager. Richie was doing it. Where did he come<br />
from? He came from some respectable place. He came from some<br />
respectable place, Phil Ellenberg.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, he did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was like a real person who had a real job, not like the rest of<br />
us. He was the ad manager. I think once you made the step to leave<br />
AT&T then you mostly concentrated on the editorial. You weren't<br />
selling ads and writing and you had Steve North who was doing a lot<br />
of the editorial.<br />
<br />
David: At the beginning, yeah. The thing is I'd be lying if I said I knew<br />
how things were going to go, I knew this was going to be a huge<br />
magazine some day. I had no clue. When I started Creative Computing<br />
there weren't even personal computers at that point. I was<br />
convinced, I guess, that they would come about. I had no idea that<br />
it would be three months later that the Altair came about. It was<br />
more that I thought that an educational magazine like we had been<br />
publishing at DEC should continue.<br />
DEC had dropped off. They stopped publishing Edu when I left the<br />
education group. Well, they published an issue or two but they<br />
really weren't serious about continuing it. Then you had all of<br />
these people out here in the west coast, the Hewlett Packard<br />
computers. They were publishing some good software, they had some<br />
good arrangements with Minnesota Educational Computers Consortium<br />
and some others to distribute stuff that they developed, but there<br />
was no information source for schools and teachers and kids that<br />
were using computers.<br />
<br />
That's what I envisioned initially, but then once the Altair and<br />
the others came out people buy this kit computer and say what can I<br />
do with it? We've got these programs that will run.<br />
<br />
Betsy: First you have to steal Basic.<br />
<br />
David: What?<br />
<br />
Betsy: First you have to steal Basic.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I noticed that, I don't know what it's called, the public opinion<br />
or I don't know the word, this part here. The number one magazine<br />
of computer applications.<br />
<br />
David: That was a Davis thing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It started off first issue a non-profit magazine of educational and<br />
recreational. That was November 1970. May/June 1975 the words non-<br />
profit disappeared.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He never set it up as a non-profit.<br />
<br />
David: I did not.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You started making a profit.<br />
<br />
David: That's right. [laughs]<br />
Betsy; It was the unintentionally non-profit.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Three years later it quietly changed into the number one magazine<br />
of computer applications and software.<br />
<br />
David: That was when Ziff Davis took over.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Really? No, that was '78.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, that was '78.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, '78.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He stayed until the end.<br />
<br />
David: Right. OK. You're right. Who knows. We changed it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It seemed like a good idea at the time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's clearly a shift from education to education plus other things.<br />
<br />
David: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think it was when he realized that if you really wanted to make a<br />
profit you had to leave education behind because teachers want<br />
everything for free, or they certainly did then.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They have some websites for teachers. They still do. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Schools, teachers, yeah, they want everything for free and they get<br />
a lot for free. Places like Huntington Computer Project. There was<br />
one out here, Oregon. Yes, there was. I think it was based right<br />
here in Portland. It would have been, right, if it was in Oregon?<br />
Yes, there was a computing consortium at that time, Hewlett Packard<br />
oriented.<br />
Then you had People's Computer Company down in California that was<br />
sort of providing stuff to schools. They were mostly into<br />
alternative schools and there were a lot of them in the Bay area at<br />
that time. In fact, there was a magazine or a newspaper, big thing,<br />
I don't know how often it came out, called the "De-school Primer".<br />
<br />
It was for people that...I won't say they were hippies but<br />
basically homeschoolers but they got together and said, "We're<br />
going to educate our kids outside of the public education system<br />
but we don't want to do it individually. We'll get together." There<br />
was a big movement there and they were into computers, unlike the<br />
public schools back in '75, '76.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Homeschooling back then was very avant-garde. It was not approved.<br />
<br />
David: Not like today. The shift away from education. That, of course, was<br />
partially driven by the hardware that was then available to people<br />
at home.<br />
When I first started the magazine, I had four editors over the<br />
years, five I guess, but Steve Gray had been publishing a<br />
newsletter, what he called the "Amateur Computer Group Newsletter".<br />
It was for engineers who were scavenging up old parts from<br />
Honeywell and IBM and GE and DEC and trying to put together a<br />
computer. You've got success stories and here's how you can make<br />
this worth together.<br />
<br />
That was a long way away from an Altair, but that's what I was<br />
focusing on, people that were doing that and education. Changed our<br />
focus. You're right. Good observation.<br />
<br />
Kevin: After that, do you feel the focus changed in the next 10 years?<br />
<br />
David: The focus changed largely due to selling the magazine to Ziff<br />
Davis.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When's that?<br />
<br />
David: We were negotiating for a while and I think the sale finally went<br />
through in '83. Yeah, '83. Maybe late '82 but roughly then. They<br />
felt that you need more of a business focus, small business and<br />
people running businesses out of their home. That's where it<br />
started but then we got into real small businesses. I shouldn't say<br />
real but a store front or a small manufacturer, something like<br />
that. That's probably a direction we would not have gone. I<br />
wouldn't have gone on my own.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had a magazine called "Small Business Computing." Remember?<br />
<br />
David: That's right, we did. I would have kept Creative more targeted on<br />
the home market and still education, to some extent, but more on<br />
the home and people that were running a business, a single<br />
entrepreneur. You could review a spreadsheet or a small business<br />
computer or higher end printer or something but not lift it up to<br />
that next level up.<br />
When you're owned by somebody else and they say this is what we<br />
want to do you've got to be responsive to it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Why did you sell? Was it something that had to be done? I've read<br />
the official line.<br />
<br />
David: I think the official line is pretty close to the real line. What<br />
happened is the first magazine, maybe not the very first but the<br />
first sizable magazine, to sell was the Byte and they sold to<br />
McGraw Hill. Then there were three or four other sales. At the time<br />
there were maybe eight special interest publishers in the country.<br />
You had Hurst and CBS magazine and Ziff Davis. Maybe eight serious<br />
ones. There were some others that were, "Oh, it'd be nice if we<br />
could get into it."<br />
What happened is all of us at that point were spending maybe<br />
$100,000, $150,000 on circulation promotion. McGraw Hill says we<br />
want to get out there, we're going to spend a million dollars.<br />
They're mailing 10 times as much as we are. They're going to trade<br />
shows with big, elaborate booths and handing out all kinds of...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Free magazines.<br />
<br />
David: Not only free magazines but other stuff. That was half of it. The<br />
other half, which was probably more than half, was the advertising<br />
sales. We were using reps. We had different reps in different parts<br />
of the country, paying the rep commission on the advertising. When<br />
you are a McGraw Hill or a Hurst or a Ziff Davis you've got an in-<br />
house staff. They would have a reception at one of the computer<br />
conferences, a big deal.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We used to have a hospitality suite at the hotels in some of these<br />
conferences and then we would bring little hunks of cheese that we<br />
cut up from home and sneak the bottles of wine up the back stairway<br />
and they were having these big things with the giant balls of<br />
shrimp.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. It was just an order of magnitude different than what we<br />
could do. What happened, really, was that it got to the point where<br />
there were only three, really two, serious bidders that were still<br />
looking for a magazine and there are still about four magazines,<br />
four decent quality magazines, on the market and one was Compute,<br />
one was Interface Age. Personal Computing had just sold, there was<br />
us, and I forget who the fourth one was. There was four.<br />
<br />
Kevin: There were more magazines than buyers at this point.<br />
<br />
David: That's right. There were a lot more magazines, too, but there were<br />
four major players. One of the buyers, I didn't really regard them<br />
as serious, and that was Atari. I think they wanted to back into<br />
the thing. The two buyers left were CBS, and they had a magazine<br />
division at that time, and Ziff Davis and that was it. I said,<br />
"Man, I've got to make a deal here." That's what happened.<br />
I look back with hindsight. I said the guy, Robert I forget his<br />
last name, that owned Compute magazine, he held out. He held out<br />
until the end and he said, "I'm better than Interface Age," and he<br />
was and whatever the other one was, Family Computing, "I'm better<br />
than them." He got a really nice payoff from CBS because it was the<br />
last one and they wanted him. I don't know. If I had held off a<br />
little more would I have gotten more? Probably.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How much did you get?<br />
<br />
David: Can we publish this figure?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't know. I don't think we ever have.<br />
<br />
David: No, we never have.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's my chance for a scoop.<br />
<br />
David: Pardon?<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's my chance for a scoop.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] I'd rather not say. I can tell you Compute, if you ever<br />
read that number, which you will, it was seven times that much. It<br />
was huge. Huge. At that point, I think CBS just said we've got to<br />
get into this. We've really got to do something. The big loser was<br />
Bob Jones at Interface Age. He had a good magazine. That was a<br />
good, solid magazine. Bob Jones, he went to shows, he was always in<br />
a suit and tie. He would have fit into the corporate environment<br />
very well but he held out too long. I think he was holding out for<br />
even more.<br />
That's what I was afraid of. Less than a year later he was out of<br />
business. There was no way you could compete with these big guys.<br />
Ziff instantly started having these receptions at PC expos.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They had ad reps all over the country.<br />
<br />
David: Ad reps, yeah. Oh my gosh. We would not have survived.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Again, you [inaudible 00:41:03] .<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Not exactly right but yes. Wasn't bad. Wasn't bad.<br />
<br />
Kevin: But Ziff didn't have it for very long before they let it go. It was<br />
only a couple of years.<br />
<br />
David: It was almost four years. Three and a half years. They did a study,<br />
and this is one of the classics. I've been making a presentation at<br />
Leslie Park last year on the 10 biggest blunders in personal<br />
computing, and actually it's up to 12 now. One was, and I still<br />
feel that it was huge, is that Ziff Davis analyzed that market in<br />
'85 and determined that the home market, the market for home<br />
computers, had reached saturation. Five percent of the homes have a<br />
computer. That's it.<br />
There were three things, three major conclusions from their survey.<br />
I think probably one and a half of them were pretty good and one<br />
and a half were just absolutely wrong. The home market reaching<br />
saturation, wrong. The second one was that they said that the<br />
magazines that would be successful would be those that were focused<br />
on specific brands of computers. Are you getting all that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: With the IBM PC it really brought standardization to the industry.<br />
Their analysis was that Apple and PC were going to be the dominant<br />
players in the future and in that they were right. They said we've<br />
got to have a magazine that's just focused on those two and they<br />
did. What was their Apple magazine? They had two Apple magazines.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A+.<br />
<br />
David: But they also had the one for the Mac.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mac User.<br />
<br />
David: They had two Apple magazines and then PC. PC they spun off a whole<br />
bunch. PC Week.<br />
<br />
Betsy: PC Junior.<br />
<br />
David: A bunch of them. In any event, they were right in that. The other<br />
one that they were semi-right, in the long term future they were<br />
totally wrong but in the short term future they were probably<br />
right, and that they looked at...We had been covering bulletin<br />
board systems. CompuServe, whatever its predecessor was, basically<br />
online type of stuff.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Genie.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. They said that's just a flash in a pan, online stuff. Well, in<br />
'85 it was. It took a while. It took another 8 to 10 years for that<br />
but then oh my God. You know what's happened today. If they had<br />
stuck with Creative Computing and rather than trying to make it a<br />
small business focused magazine but kept the home and the online<br />
focus we would have owned the Internet market today, absolutely<br />
owned it. It would have been a bigger magazine than all the others<br />
put together. Hindsight is 20/20.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I know it wasn't your choice but do you have regret about that?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: At the time it was devastating.<br />
<br />
David: Absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was like someone killing your child.<br />
<br />
David: At the time, we sat in these meetings up in Stanford, Connecticut,<br />
of all places. The reason for that is Bill Ziff. What happened in<br />
the interim a year or two after they purchased Creative Computing<br />
and PC, Bill Ziff came down with cancer really big time and was<br />
afraid of dying next year. So he was moving all of his resources<br />
and the holdings outside of New York to avoid really major<br />
taxation. I'm not sure that Connecticut was much better but he was<br />
splitting them between Connecticut and Florida. Anyway, we wound up<br />
having a bunch of meetings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was trying to maintain residence in Connecticut.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I guess that was it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was living in the Crown Plaza.<br />
<br />
David: I remember the last one. We were up at the hotel.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Crown Plaza. It was Stanford, it wasn't Harvard.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, Stanford.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I said Harvard.<br />
<br />
David: When they finally came and said we're going to shut this down. That<br />
was a devastating time. We probably could have continued to work<br />
for Ziff if we had been willing to go into New York but when you<br />
get used to working a mile or two from where you live the idea of<br />
commuting into New York, who knows what the job would have been.<br />
Bye. That was it. That was, in retrospect, a mistake.<br />
The other thing that happened as a result of Bill Ziff having this<br />
bout with cancer is that Ziff Davis sold off all of their other<br />
special interest magazines. Popular Boating, Popular Photography.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yachting, Modern Bride.<br />
<br />
David: They had a big group of travel magazines. Actually, one of the<br />
things they did after Creative Computing was to shut down...we got<br />
friendly with the publisher and some of the people in the traveling<br />
division and we started doing some freelance travel writing.<br />
I was writing a monthly column for one of the travel magazines that<br />
went to travel agents on automating your travel office and so on,<br />
which was an interesting thing because there's a small business<br />
that really depended upon computers with the reservation systems<br />
and all the airlines had a different reservation system. You had to<br />
have Saber.<br />
<br />
A lot of them would go with one and make an agreement with somebody<br />
else to make their other reservations. In any event, it was a bad<br />
system and I was writing a column on how to make this work for you.<br />
As you know, I don't know how many months later we got into the<br />
Atari camp.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was your next gig?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. It was Joe Sugarman, remember, that hooked us up with Atari.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I thought it was Neil Harris.<br />
<br />
David: He was the one we worked with but it was Sugarman.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because he came from Commodore. I didn't know it was Joe Sugarman.<br />
<br />
David: He ran a company called JS&A for Joe Sugarman and Associates. They<br />
were the first one that took these full page ads in lots of<br />
different magazines and the quarter page...<br />
<br />
Betsy: The first advertorials.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, advertorial. The first print advertorials. Really serious<br />
stuff. Out of that, he spawned at least a dozen other companies.<br />
Sharper Image is a Sugarman and it's a spinoff. They've got a whole<br />
page just focused on this air ionizer or some crazy product, but he<br />
sold tons of that stuff. Then he started offering courses. He was<br />
on the verge of doing some big deal with Atari and so he knew all<br />
the people out there.<br />
I had taken his course and started running the ad. In fact, there's<br />
probably one in one of those issues that is basically a Sugarman<br />
ad. And so anyway, you took the course, too. So we got to know him.<br />
He got to know us, and we kept up. And, oh, OK. Creative Computing<br />
has folded, and I'm trying to get something going with Atari and<br />
getting their magazine really serious. And so he was the one that<br />
hooked us up with them. By the way, I'm surprised that you don't<br />
have Atari Explorer on your website<br />
<br />
Kevin: On the website? Well, the deal with my Atari magazines website is<br />
I've always strove to get permission. Atari can't be owned by the<br />
same company for more than three months at time.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's hard to get permission that way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You can't get permission. But it's out there, elsewhere. There are<br />
other archivists who don't bother to get permission. That's another<br />
good way to do things. Yeah, it's out there. I think Archive.org<br />
has it.<br />
<br />
David: Really? Yeah, because I hadn't seen it. I was looking for<br />
something...I still get inquires every once in a while from<br />
somebody that wants something in one of the previous magazines that<br />
we've published.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That's why I don't' risk it. There's a few magazine that I just<br />
absolutely would not, because it's owned by some giant monolith<br />
corporation now, and they need to hold on everything even if it's<br />
30 years old.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because someday they might be able to make money from it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right. That's why that's not there.<br />
Talk to me about...You did some weird stuff. The weird stuff I'm<br />
thinking of is the board game.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: "Computer Rage."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We just saw that. We might not have even remembered what it was it,<br />
but we saw it last night at the museum.<br />
<br />
David: They have one in the Collection's area of the Computer Museum. They<br />
didn't even know that we published it. I thought, "Look at this."<br />
<br />
Kevin: You did Computer Rage, which was weird; I want to ask you about<br />
that. You did the record album.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The record album made way more sense than the game.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, well it was a guy named Allan. He was a colonel at that time<br />
and he came to see me with the idea for the computer game.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I forgot about that.<br />
<br />
David: He was a colonel in the Army and had something to do with<br />
educational programs. The Army said people should know more about<br />
how computers work and everything else. He said, "The games that<br />
are on the market are pretty tacky and not fun. I've devised<br />
something." We worked together with him. We finally decided, "All<br />
right. We'll publish this game. By the way, he's a general and<br />
finally retired.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But he's not financing his retirement with [inaudible 00:54:29] .<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: No, not at all.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Will anyone buy this?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We did overprint.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't a big seller or big success, but we sold enough of them.<br />
Now the record was a little different. There was a guy named Dick<br />
Moberg who, at the time, was the president of the Philadelphia Area<br />
Computer Society. The first two personal computer festivals were<br />
actually in New Jersey, not the west coast. The West Coast Computer<br />
Faire came later with Jim Warren and that group. John Dilks started<br />
this computer festival in Atlantic City. This was before Atlantic<br />
City was a big casino place, but...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well, it was a casino place, but...<br />
<br />
David: ...but it was pretty tacky.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It still is.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Not like now.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not like now where it's so classy.<br />
<br />
David: In any event, they were having some issues with the hotel and the<br />
convention center in Atlantic City. Dick Moberg said, "We people in<br />
Philadelphia can do a better job than you guys in New Jersey." And<br />
he got together with what was his name? Lenny? And<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh! Saul Levis.<br />
<br />
David: Saul Levis, who was the president of the New Jersey amateur<br />
computer group. The two of them got together and said yeah, it'll<br />
be more convenient if we do a thing in Philadelphia. And Saul<br />
Levis, he had put together the first Trenton computer festival. It<br />
wasn't a big huge thing; it's gotten to be gigantic. In any event<br />
they said OK, we'll do this. At that point, this was '78; the Apple<br />
had just come out and people were making little plug-in<br />
peripherals.<br />
There was a company that...I'm not going to be able to remember who<br />
it was. They made a nice little plug-in board for the Apple. What<br />
they had was a very nice thing on the screen where you could<br />
position notes and then have them played back. So it was a visual<br />
programming of music.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Music Construction Center?<br />
<br />
Betsy: There were ads for it in magazines.<br />
<br />
David: No, it was a guy out of Denver. I don't remember. Anyway, before<br />
that everything had appeared line by line. But there were some<br />
reasonable playback systems that were starting to come on the<br />
market for the S-100 bus. There were about four of them. The<br />
programming was a little bit harrier, but nonetheless they sounded<br />
OK. And then there was still the leftovers in a sense that people<br />
that were doing work on mainframes to process music.<br />
So Dick Moberg said, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could get a number<br />
of these together?" And of course there's the Philadelphia<br />
Orchestra, we'll make it a Philadelphia Computer Music Festival! So<br />
it was largely his idea, but then, how do you publicize it? Well,<br />
you've got this magazine that's in your backyard, that was willing<br />
to recruit some people and publicize it. So we got about...I don't<br />
know at the festival there were probably 25 or 30 people that had<br />
stuff.<br />
<br />
They recorded it all, which in retrospect was a bit of a mistake<br />
because they had problems with one of the two channels in the<br />
stereo. They had the big reel-to-reel tape recorder, one of the<br />
channels was seriously too low. And then they said, "Well, we've<br />
got this wonderful tape; what are we going to do with it?" And I<br />
said, "Well, I'll do something with it."<br />
<br />
I hooked up with a studio in the city that made records, and we<br />
went in there and corrected the low channel a little bit, not<br />
totally, but enough that it sounded like stereo. And put together a<br />
vinyl record!<br />
<br />
I edited out a lot of the poor quality performances, made the<br />
record, and that sold! It sold pretty well. Our biggest problem was<br />
shipping. How do you ship a 12-inch vinyl record without it<br />
breaking? But that sold pretty well. That, of course, died off<br />
along with everything else when Creative Computing got killed by<br />
Ziff. But, I still had the original test pressing of that, the<br />
original, original.<br />
<br />
I played it back, and it sounded very good. Put it into, I forget<br />
what the software was, but, it was one, the digital routine. It<br />
would have been nice if I still had the original tape, but, I<br />
didn't. But, OK, it's got a little bit of deterioration, going to a<br />
record.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, we're not talking about losing overtones of a<br />
violin up at 15,000 hertz. It was within a narrow band, to begin<br />
with, in any event. But that did let me totally correct the left<br />
channel and bring it up to what it should be. I put that out. I'm<br />
selling CDs now, of that.<br />
<br />
In fact, a guy from Australia ordered one, and obviously, the<br />
postage to send anything overseas is a lot more. He said, "Why<br />
don't you just make MP3 files out of it?" Because, they're WAV<br />
files, the way they are now. I go, "OK."<br />
<br />
This is very recent, like within the last couple of weeks, I<br />
downloaded some software, "Convert WAV to MP3," converted it, sent<br />
them the files. They said, "That's great." What I think what I'll<br />
probably do is try to figure out how I can make them available from<br />
a website.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You've apparently forgotten that, like, 10 years ago, I did that.<br />
They're there.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. I know.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They're at vintagecomputermusic.com.<br />
<br />
David: Are they MP3s?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Well, then, I don't have to do it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You dummy.<br />
<br />
David: Bam. I did remember. I didn't know that you did them all. I thought<br />
you did a sample.<br />
<br />
Kevin: No. They're all there. I can see you're getting reflux.<br />
<br />
David: Boom. I wasted a little time. I waste a lot of time, these days.<br />
That was a cool thing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just think it was neat that you guys were willing to take chances<br />
with weird stuff.<br />
<br />
David: Where we took chances with really weird stuff was in the software.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Software publishing?<br />
<br />
David: We had a brand called, Sensational Software. Unfortunately, Ziff<br />
decided it was competing with some potential advertisers, which it<br />
was, in a sense. They killed it off. But, we had some really good<br />
stuff. We had the Apple game, what the heck was it? It was ported<br />
directly over from the arcade games.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Was it, "Space Invaders"?<br />
<br />
David: "Space Invaders."<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was a clone of, "Space Invaders"?<br />
<br />
David: It was the real.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You got it from, Jeff Lee's guy.<br />
<br />
David: Because, "Space Invaders," the Japanese game, was one of the first<br />
full-sized console video games where they used a general-purpose<br />
chip. "Space Invaders," was programmed for the 6502, Apple.<br />
We bought it from this Japanese company, and we had the only real<br />
"Space Invaders" game. That was one, and a couple of others that we<br />
really could have gone places with. That was just about the time<br />
that Ziff came in and said, "Nah, you can't have this anymore."<br />
<br />
They were into printed media, so, they kept the books going, but,<br />
not any of the other stuff. The other thing we had, was, speaking<br />
of computer music, a little division, that probably could have<br />
gotten a lot bigger, called Peripherals Plus. We were marketing a<br />
little computer music board, it was an S-100 bus once. But if we<br />
had then...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Didn't we have a plotter, too?<br />
<br />
David: Yep. We had about five or six interesting, low-level products. But,<br />
again, Ziff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That stuff was really competing with the advertisers.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Obviously, that wasn't our intent. But, yes it was. We also<br />
offered courses at that time. Do you remember, at County College?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't.<br />
<br />
David: That was just at when we moved into the new building at Hanover. We<br />
had two people that were doing that.<br />
<br />
Betsy: One of them was that crazy, Larry guy. He was seriously weird.<br />
<br />
David: County College of Morris, we reached an agreement that we would<br />
teach their Introductory Computer course. Not for their day<br />
students, but they offered evening courses, adult education, we<br />
were doing that. Fingers in a lot of pies, at that point.<br />
Actually, from that standpoint, it was, probably, good that Ziff<br />
got us a little bit more focused, and back to the roots of<br />
publishing. Getting spread a little thin.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You went to Atari, got the Atari game, and you did the "Atari<br />
Explorer," right?<br />
<br />
David: "Atari Explorer." They had had an occasional publication, not<br />
really a magazine, but one that was focused on the games, and they<br />
decided that they could start that one up again. It started up with<br />
a new name. We called it, "Atarian." It was focused, basically, on<br />
video games. You buy one of their video games and you get an issue.<br />
Anyway, there were different ways that they were going to promote<br />
it.<br />
But, a year later Nintendo just, absolutely, buried "Atarian," in<br />
'89. They kept Atari Spore going for, I think, two more issues,<br />
right?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Was it two?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember the details.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't much.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I remember why they killed it.<br />
<br />
David: Ms. Feisty here. Come on. You've got to tell the story here.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They were playing games with our printer. Production schedule.<br />
Everybody had a production schedule. We never missed our production<br />
date, getting things to the printer, getting them mailed. We just<br />
did it because that's what you had to do. I will probably get sued<br />
for this. Atari started not paying the printer and the printer says<br />
we're not going to print this until we get paid. The date kept<br />
slipping and slipping and the subscribers would be calling up and<br />
saying, "Where's my magazine?"<br />
This went on. It was bi-monthly. It went on for maybe six months. I<br />
finally wrote an editorial in which I explained to the readers<br />
exactly what was going on. They didn't see it until it was printed.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
David: That didn't get into the magazine, though.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It did.<br />
<br />
David: That's right, it did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They never saw it. We were producing it out of [inaudible 01:10:07]<br />
New Jersey and printing it in eastern Pennsylvania and they never<br />
saw it until it was too late. My tenure was cut short but I didn't<br />
really care at that point. I was sick of them. It was really hard.<br />
They're not easy people to deal with, even when the owners last for<br />
more than three months. That was my suicide by editorial. The only<br />
time in my life I've ever been fired.<br />
<br />
David: I didn't realize they didn't read that beforehand but I should<br />
have. I should have.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] I probably wouldn't have gotten fired if they had.<br />
<br />
David: That was the straw that broke the camera's back.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But then John [inaudible 01:11:05] kept doing it a little bit.<br />
<br />
David: I know. In a lot of cases, particularly with the games magazine,<br />
they wanted to approve everything that went in it. If you do an<br />
objective product review, you call it like it is. Oh m gosh, there<br />
was one, it wasn't just one product but a roundup after Consumer<br />
Electronics' show, and I don't remember what it was. Atari had<br />
brought out some new products that really weren't ready to go.<br />
In some cases I just said, "I'm not going to say anything about<br />
this one or these two or three. I'll focus on the ones that are<br />
ready to go or are in good shape." Oh my gosh. "What about this?<br />
This is a wonderful thing." "Well, maybe it will be but it isn't<br />
yet." We had issues all along on censorship and them changing what<br />
we had written and everything. As Betsy said, they were not nice<br />
people to work with. I forget, the two brothers.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Trammell.<br />
<br />
David: Trammell, yeah. That came from Commodore.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Jack and somebody else. Jack and his brother.<br />
<br />
David: It was interesting because yesterday I saw Nolan Bushnell. He was<br />
at that event. Nolan was flamboyant, but basically he had integrity<br />
and he was an honest guy. Man, oh man. Didn't stay and the<br />
corporation changed after he left.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Then you're done with Atari and then it's straight to military<br />
vehicles there?<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] No.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was a hiatus.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, man. We published magazines, in-house magazines, for a couple<br />
other organizations. Did one for Nabisco called...I don't even<br />
remember but it was for their marketing department. Published that<br />
for some period of time and then they decided to bring it in-house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was more like a newsletter.<br />
<br />
David: It was 16 pages. It was getting there.<br />
<br />
Betsy: 16 pages is a newsletter.<br />
<br />
David: All right. Magazine format. Let's put it that way. We did some<br />
fulfillment. Basically, a lot of freelance writing on the travel<br />
field.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Stuffed dogs. The stuffed dogs. Remember those four dogs for my<br />
brother?<br />
<br />
David: That's fulfillment. Fulfillment for Con Edison. I published a<br />
couple newsletters for a while, one called "Effective Investing"<br />
and one called "Effective Communication" for writers. We're talking<br />
early '90s.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was when people still cared, thought that there might be a<br />
correct way to do something and they wanted to know what it was.<br />
<br />
David: That was focused on "Take this computer and start to use it as a<br />
tool. Don't be afraid of the thing." '91/'92 not everybody was<br />
using a computer yet or a personal computer. That was the<br />
orientation of that. Then the other thing we got into big time was<br />
we'd been involved with a local rescue mission for men with drug,<br />
alcohol, homeless issues and we were writing and producing their<br />
newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We were producing all of their fundraising material.<br />
<br />
David: We started, I think, with the newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, we did everything. Appeal letters and newsletters and<br />
maintaining their database, the donor database. It took a lot of<br />
time.<br />
<br />
David: We did that for five years. Then '96 I got an opportunity to buy<br />
this crazy military vehicles magazine for people that were<br />
restoring old historic military vehicles. It was a magazine but it<br />
was I guess more of a glorified newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was horrible.<br />
<br />
David: It was horrible but it was really terrible. In fact, the editor or<br />
the publisher, whatever, the owner, he'd take the articles however<br />
the writer would send them. If it was double spaced type, boom,<br />
that's what would appear in the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Save all the typesetting.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He had zero typesetting expense.<br />
<br />
David: Zero editing. He just took anything that came in, put it in. Ads<br />
the same way. Half the ads were hand written. Well, not half, but a<br />
significant number had corrections on them by hand. Oh my gosh. It<br />
was so terrible. I made it into a real magazine and built it up. At<br />
that point the circulation had been about 10,000. We built it up<br />
and we were pushing close to 20,000 magazines. It was a real<br />
magazine. I sold it to Crowsey publications.<br />
Then they, which I did not realize at the time, the owner, Chet<br />
Crowsey, had put the whole company up for sale and he sold the<br />
company a year or two later to some other specialty magazine<br />
publisher. We're talking narrow, narrow niche. They published a lot<br />
of, what'd they call it, white tail bow hunting. Really, really<br />
narrow stuff. Up in northern Wisconsin is where they were based. In<br />
any event, he sold it.<br />
<br />
The new publishers, their whole stick was making money. They<br />
immediately raised the subscription price of military vehicles. We<br />
were charging $18 a year which was fine and they raised it to<br />
$21.95 or something and they raised the advertising rates and<br />
everything else.<br />
<br />
The last I knew, the circulation was back down around 10,000.<br />
[laughs] It doesn't pay off to take that approach. I didn't have<br />
the same emotional connection, with that as I did with Creative<br />
Computing and the other magazines there. Fine, you do what you want<br />
with the magazine, it's OK.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You didn't care too much?<br />
<br />
David: Nah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What do you guys do now? It seems like charity work and [inaudible<br />
01:19:45] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. I run a non-profit called Beyond the Walls and he runs his<br />
website and does Bible studies.<br />
<br />
David: Right. Actually, Betsy, the organization she has, she's executive<br />
director of Beyond the Wall, that's gotten huge.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's getting bigger and bigger.<br />
<br />
David: It's gotten huge.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think huge is probably an exaggeration.<br />
<br />
David: Well, not huge like a Gates Foundation thing.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I wish. We started in 2005 with 26 volunteers going to Guatemala to<br />
work with this organization that works with the people who scavenge<br />
in the Guatemala City garbage dump. The dump is in a ravine. It<br />
started in the early '50s and as it has filled up around the edges<br />
they put a couple layers of sand on it and let it sit for a bit and<br />
then the people build houses on it out of scraps and things that<br />
they made.<br />
This organization called Potter's House that we work with has been<br />
working with them for 26 years. They have an education program,<br />
micro-enterprise and health and various things that they do. Since<br />
2005 we've been sending volunteer teams. We're not the only ones<br />
sending volunteer teams down there to build houses and do<br />
healthcare and do stuff with the kids. So we started with 26 and by<br />
the end of the year we'll be well over 150 volunteers. We'll have<br />
three weeks this summer, I'll have 135 over three weeks this<br />
summer.<br />
<br />
It started in our backyard and one of the reasons that we wanted<br />
to...It started in the church and we started the organization<br />
partially because it's easier to raise money if you're not a church<br />
and it's also easier to make the volunteer opportunities available<br />
to people. If you say "Oh I'm going to Guatemala." "Oh I'd love to<br />
go with you! Who's going?" "It's my church." "Oh."<br />
<br />
But, if it's this local non-profit it's more appealing and we've<br />
really succeeded in doing that because we have people not only from<br />
in our own community, but this year we're going to have a family<br />
from Oklahoma, about six families from Texas, several people from<br />
Florida.<br />
<br />
David: You got the Virginia.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Virginia. It's like oh my goodness. How is this happening?<br />
<br />
Kevin: And everyone goes out to Guatemala and does the [inaudible<br />
01:22:31] ?<br />
[cross talk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. We all meet in Guatemala. I have three teams. One each week,<br />
and I'll be there the whole time and they'll come down and probably<br />
each team will build two or three houses. They'll do medical<br />
clinic, they'll do day camp for kids, soccer or baseball, sports<br />
things.<br />
They were about teenagers, so they love to do the...Everybody does<br />
construction in the morning. Then, in the afternoon teenage girls<br />
and some of the boys who want to do other stuff will help out with<br />
these other kid-related activities. That's what I'm doing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My wife is in Africa this week and last doing something similar.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Cool.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Which is why I have to leave shortly to go get my kids.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: What part of Africa is she in?<br />
<br />
Kevin: She did some stuff for Special Olympics. Then, they were helping<br />
build something at a food bank. I don't know that much yet, because<br />
she's not home yet.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Cool.<br />
<br />
David: That's terrific. She'll be changed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: She keeps telling that she wished I could've come, and I do, too.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You have this kid. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: We've got the two kids. The six-year-old doesn't feed herself real<br />
well.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: She can't drive to school.<br />
<br />
David: Your annual budget has gone from 0 to what? Are you going to hit<br />
about 150, 200,000 this year?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's over 300 already.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, OK. [laughs] 300.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's small potatoes compared to...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: As my boss, the Chairman of the Board, and I'm the only employee,<br />
is fond of saying, "The people out there don't realize that we're<br />
just a bunch of schlumps sitting around a table making this stuff<br />
up as we go along. Very good leadership. He's a very good leader.<br />
<br />
David: We were trying to maybe see if we can touch base with the Gates<br />
Foundation when we were up there. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: We got a brochure into his hands.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we got a brochure into his hands and some other stuff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was Bill Gates there?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah. I had a picture of him that I had taken at the first<br />
Altair convention in 1976, before he had actually made the deal<br />
with Altair to develop BASIC. He had said, "I can do it," but they<br />
hadn't signed the whole thing. I've got a picture of him as a 20-<br />
year-old or thereabouts, talking at this little convention.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You showed it to him?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. I gave him a copy. The problem I had is that...some people<br />
keep everything. I pretty much give everything away.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, you are lying. You keep everything.<br />
<br />
David: I do keep a lot of stuff. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Then, you give it away later. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Well, when Stan Freiberger was putting together the "Fire in<br />
the Valley" book, I gave him a lot of photographs and I gave him<br />
the originals. Then the publisher said, "It's not good enough. The<br />
photo. You get the negative." OK, they're gone. Never any of that<br />
came back. In fact, what I had to do is scan the photo from the<br />
book to make the print to give to Bill.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Photos of being young and cute.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was his Woody Allen phase. He looked exactly like Woody Allen<br />
did at that phase in his life.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:26:30] too.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm sure there is.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It is a lot [inaudible 01:26:33] .<br />
<br />
David: She improves with age. Every year.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I saw the picture! You look the same.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, the instant Paul Allen showed up, of course, everybody's<br />
mingling around this museum. All of a sudden there was like an<br />
arrow head over in that direction.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was this sucking sound.<br />
<br />
David: And then Bill shows up and, oh my God, everybody has to go see<br />
Bill.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was talking to Bob Rynett this morning, the guy who organized it,<br />
and he said, "Oh, Paul was very happy. Paul was very pleased with<br />
the way the event went." He said his only regret was that he and<br />
Bill didn't have enough time to spend with the people. And I'm<br />
thinking, "Well, OK, if you just stayed a little longer."<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Well, at least Paul Allen did come to the dinner.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, he stayed a little longer, but Bill, he was in and out like<br />
a...<br />
<br />
David: Bill was there for maybe an hour.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He just showed up because he had to.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, exactly. It was a cameo.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:27:52] cameo there?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, yes. There I am. I was thinner then. Oh! There's Ted in his<br />
hat! And Peter [inaudible 01:28:02] . Who's that guy?<br />
<br />
David: Dick Heiser was at the convention and he had one of the hats. The<br />
Xanadu hat.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was wearing one of those hats. The rings were actually silver.<br />
Oh and there's Johnny Anderson. He's the one that wrote that<br />
crazy...<br />
<br />
This was our building.<br />
<br />
David: That was the greenhouse garage building that we started. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: And there was a hole. Was it you or my brother that made a hole in<br />
the wall for an air conditioner?<br />
<br />
David: It was your brother.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And the building was painted white after...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is that the air conditioner? You comment about the low tech air<br />
conditioning.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, that was in an actual window. This building had been painted<br />
white after and right about here a hole had been made in the wall<br />
for this through-the-wall air conditioner. It was rented and when<br />
we moved out, we had this hole in the wall. So, my brother takes<br />
this spare ceiling panel that we had. It was white and sort of<br />
stuffed it in the hole and filled it up so that it really didn't<br />
show any more. We never heard any more about it.<br />
<br />
David: That building today is...<br />
<br />
Betsy: They've made it very fancy.<br />
<br />
David: Oh my gosh! It's a boutique shop and it's really nice. And they<br />
didn't even tear it down. It wasn't a tear-down and rebuild. At any<br />
event, we were not into spending money on facilities. Absolutely<br />
not. The last place that we were in was a printing company had<br />
owned it and they had taken three very small houses that backed up<br />
to railroad tracks and then they built a large warehouse at the end<br />
that was relatively modern. Then they just connected the three<br />
houses with little walkway and so we were in the first house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You couldn't tell that it was two houses.<br />
<br />
David: No. The art department was in the second, then the software group<br />
was in the third one. We had our fulfillment and storage and stuff<br />
in the warehouse.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How much money did you spend on the facility?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not much.<br />
<br />
David: We were spending money on expansion, growing, grow, grow. Then Ziff<br />
Davis comes in, they say, "You got this wonderful warehouse."<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's our warehouse now, right?<br />
<br />
David: That's right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It wasn't though, because you owned it.<br />
<br />
David: I know, but in any event, they said we're going to use it. We're<br />
moving some of your operation, advertising, sales into New York,<br />
therefore you will have more space. It wasn't the trade-off of the<br />
same kind of space or anything. What they did is, they have all<br />
these other magazines at that point, things like "Popular Boating"<br />
and "Yachting" and everything else. All of those magazines, when<br />
you subscribed you got a premium. You got a tote bag or something.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A backpack or a cushion.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. They moved all of their premium fulfillment out to our<br />
warehouse. They said, "Because you're not going to have a software<br />
department anymore, so you won't have to ship any software. We're<br />
going to bring all of our premiums out there." We still have<br />
"Yachting" bags.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yachting bags and seat bags.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Speaking of fulfillment that was something that we did. We were<br />
real pioneers in doing our own fulfillment.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: That's true...<br />
<br />
Betsy: All magazines then used fulfillment houses. You would just send all<br />
the little cards and white mail and everything to your fulfillment<br />
house and they would just take care, enter it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Reader service cards and...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Exactly, and then they would send the labels.<br />
<br />
David: Everything went either to Boulder, Colorado, Des Moines, Iowa, or<br />
some place in Florida.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So when you say pioneers, does that mean you were cheap?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well no, because we were not getting good service, we weren't happy<br />
with the service the readers were getting. And so we decided to<br />
bring it in it house, and we brought a program from a company in<br />
Boston that had written a program to run a PDP11.<br />
And we did we brought the whole thing in-house. We had our own data<br />
entry people. Did all the caging, taking the money out in-house.<br />
Printed our own labels and ship, because then you had to print them<br />
and ship them because there was no electronic delivery.<br />
<br />
David: You know we were real pioneers there and we did spent some money.<br />
Because PDP1170 was not a low-end, with a platter and disk, 12<br />
inch, maybe 15 inch, but a big, big platter drive, and data entry<br />
terminals, DECWriters, VT05. And when Ziff came in, I mean they<br />
were blown away that we were doing our own fulfillment, and doing a<br />
very efficiently.<br />
And the other thing we were doing also was the reader service<br />
cards. We were doing all our own processing of that. The same<br />
computer is same system. A Mini Data System, that's what it was.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No.<br />
<br />
David: No? OK.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mini data was the one you were using...<br />
<br />
[Day 2]<br />
<br />
<br />
David: A couple of the questions you asked yesterday got us to thinking<br />
about things we probably should have mentioned or clarified.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK let's go, let me grab a pen.<br />
<br />
David: One of the corrections, Betsy remembered better than I. the<br />
embezzlement that we were talking about was actually 79 not 78 it<br />
doesn't make a lot of difference but was a year later. It was a<br />
year after I had left my day job, and I was really depending upon<br />
Creative Computing for my income and everything else. So to lose<br />
that was a big blow at that time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So that could have been the end of things right there?<br />
<br />
David: Yes absolutely it could have.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was 79 not 78, is what you're saying.<br />
<br />
David: That's what I said it was 79 not 78.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I was going to ask you to move closer to the microphone.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Actually I don't have to do this. My ego is completely uninvolved.<br />
I would go sit and play with the cats.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Please, please be here. You supplement Dave's memory.<br />
<br />
David: Yes exactly she's very good at that.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: I want to know, how are you going to know how to spell things? He<br />
used the name John Dilks. If you go to write it out, how do you<br />
know how to spell John Dilks?<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'll either Google it, and if it's not in Wikipedia, I'll have to<br />
come back to you and ask, or if they're mentioned in the magazines.<br />
I'll do my best.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm not saying it in a critical way, I'm just impressed that you<br />
don't ask.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just feel this way, I can have everything. I don't have to write<br />
it down. I can concentrate on the conversation, rather than taking<br />
notes.<br />
<br />
David: OK. One thing I thought would be kind of worthwhile...putting the<br />
whole era of the early computer magazines into a perspective. In a<br />
sense, personal computing itself went through several eras as it<br />
accelerated and became so widespread. It certainly didn't start<br />
that way.<br />
You almost have to look at a period before there were personal<br />
computers -- the pre-personal computer era, which I would say would<br />
be 1972 or so up through '75, when the first computers came out.<br />
What was happening then was you had big time-sharing systems.<br />
<br />
Then, manufacturers like DEC and HP were making smaller time-<br />
sharing systems for terminals on a computer. Specifically, Bob<br />
Albrecht opened up People's Computer Company down in San Carlos,<br />
San Mateo, one of the "Sans." It was an open to the public place.<br />
What were people going to do with computers? Well, he wrote this<br />
book of what to do after you hit return, of games.<br />
<br />
Then I wrote my book, not for his center, but for people in the<br />
east that had access to the same type of things on DEC computers.<br />
Those two books actually came out in '72. That was well<br />
before....There was an impetus for people to use computers. Even<br />
though it was mini-computers and they didn't really have their own,<br />
they did have access.<br />
<br />
That, I think, was an important thing because, then, when the kit<br />
computers first came out, which is '75, we really had the kit<br />
computer era from '75 to around '78. That's when it primary was,<br />
the do-it-yourself, build-it-yourself.<br />
<br />
Who did those computers appeal to? It was largely people who were<br />
OK with things like soldering guns. That was largely HAM radio<br />
people. You look at "73" magazine and "Radio Electronics," those<br />
were the ones that dragged the hardware people into the field, and<br />
"Popular Electronics," of course, with the Altair in January, '75.<br />
<br />
You had to know something about, and be a little bit capable with<br />
your hands to get into it. That continued but dwindled off by 1980,<br />
because of course, in '78, you had the three biggies, not biggies,<br />
but self-contained, assembled computers: the Commodore PET, TRS-80,<br />
and the Apple all came out in '78. They were proprietary platforms,<br />
nobody was sharing stuff.<br />
<br />
Actually, the S-100 bus was more shareable. More people got a card<br />
that you could plug into the S-100 bus. There was more, but on the<br />
other hand, you had to build it. That was really a stumbling block<br />
for a lot of people. Then processor technology with the SAL. OK,<br />
here's an S-100 bus machine, but it's all built. That was a big<br />
leap.<br />
<br />
Anyway, you had the, what I call, proprietary era from '78 to '82.<br />
Then it kind of dwindled off, although Apple certainly kept going.<br />
When the IBM PC came out, '81, '82, '83, that ushered in the<br />
standardization era. Everybody, "OK, we're going to make an IBM PC<br />
clone." It was really only Apple, and to a lesser extent, the Atari<br />
and the Commodore that kept going with their own proprietary stuff.<br />
They really couldn't keep going.<br />
<br />
At that time, we started working with Atari. They using the same<br />
chip that Apple had. I thought, "Man, that's an opportunity. Why<br />
don't they just make an agreement with Apple to run Apple software<br />
and everything." They got a 6502, that family of chips in there,<br />
why not? But that wasn't Atari's way of doing things, as you well<br />
know.<br />
<br />
In any event, they went through those stages. As a new one came<br />
along, the other one died off. That though then affected the<br />
magazines, Creative Computing, we came from the pre-era, in a<br />
sense. From the education applications and people having access to<br />
small, minicomputer time sharing systems. When Altair basic was<br />
announced, then it was the obvious thing that we would port over<br />
programs to that.<br />
<br />
Other magazines such as "Byte" and some of the hardware magazines,<br />
they really came from the HAM radio end of things. Wayne Green, who<br />
started "Byte," was publishing "73," which was the biggest magazine<br />
in HAM radio. HAM fests were one of the earliest places where<br />
computers were, or at least hardware, do-it-yourself computers were<br />
really seen and popularized. Wasn't till a little later that we had<br />
computer festivals.<br />
<br />
The real early computer festivals in '75, '76, had a big overlap<br />
with Ham radio. The early ones in New Jersey. That was the earliest<br />
ones. It was, I think, more, not more, but at least half was<br />
oriented to Ham radio. Then, it broadened out, of course, with more<br />
applications being reproduced. Anyway, I think it's kind of<br />
important to know how things fit into that whole scheme of things.<br />
<br />
Magazines either came from the Ham radio and hardware side of<br />
things. They had a different perspective than those like Creative<br />
Computing.<br />
<br />
Well, Peoples' Computer Company, Bob Aldberg, could have had a real<br />
winning magazine, but he was too much in the alternative mode. So,<br />
Peoples' Computer Company never really made it as a magazine. He<br />
didn't want to do advertising or anything that would...<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was a different avenue. It was more like a tabloid-style<br />
newspaper.<br />
<br />
David: Newspaper, yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was more glossy.<br />
<br />
David: Exactly.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was a very different field.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Again, magazine publishing. I remember, early on, I was on a<br />
TV show. McNeil Lehrer Report on Public Broadcasting. Life Magazine<br />
was being re-launched and Time-Warner was spending a ton of money<br />
on this re-launch. They had the publisher of Life Magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was probably Time-Life back then. I don't think it...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. That's right. It wasn't Time. Well, I think it was close to<br />
the time that they merged. Anyway. Yeah. It was Time-Life. Then,<br />
they had me. Sort of the opposite extreme.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You're going to be covered in cat hair by the time you're here.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, I am sure.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's OK. But it matches and sort of goes with it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. It matches fine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You have kind of a theme here. The black and white.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes. Yes. Sorry to interrupt.<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, they were interviewing both of us. They were going to spend<br />
more money on their first issue than our entire annual budget, for<br />
everything. The difference in big publishers, because we we're<br />
talking about that a little bit yesterday, is huge. Really huge.<br />
Now, the interesting thing is there was a magazine back then. I<br />
don't know if it's still around today, called Folio. It was a<br />
magazine for magazine publishers. They covered all aspects of it.<br />
Subscription fulfillment, typesetting and everything else and the<br />
business aspects of running a magazine.<br />
<br />
They had some figures, which were true for a long period of time.<br />
That one out of seven magazine startups makes it for one year. One<br />
out of seven. That's low. Of those, one out of seven makes it for<br />
five years. So, were talking about...<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think Wayne told me almost the exact same statistic.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. One out of 50 new magazines makes it for five years or more.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: Once you make it five years, you're probably good to go for awhile.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
The new Life Magazine comes back, roaring back in. Where are they<br />
today, or even 10 years later from that point. Gone. Didn't make<br />
it. In any event, yesterday we were talking a little bit about<br />
where did we put all our money.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
David: Well, all our money wasn't an awful lot compared to big publishers.<br />
We were a small player. We're big in that field, but...<br />
<br />
Kevin: You're a big fish in a little bowl.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Yeah. There wasn't a lot. Betsy reminded me this morning that<br />
one of the things we did to, in a sense, keep control, is we bought<br />
our own typesetting equipment.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Used of course.<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Used.<br />
<br />
David: Used. Yes. We didn't want to send stuff out to a typesetter<br />
where...what did you [inaudible 00:14:22] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was the same thing with the fulfillment. You are sending it to a<br />
service that gives your work to a minimum wage person who couldn't<br />
care less. Puts her time in and...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Plus you still had code and things that needed to be done right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Done right. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Otherwise it was useless.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. We didn't typeset the code usually. We would actually pace<br />
down the printouts. Part of it was for efficiency and probably, in<br />
the long run, it was cheaper. Just to turn your typesetting around,<br />
send it out and wait for your galleys to come back. Then you<br />
proofread them. Then you'd send it back. Then they make the<br />
corrections maybe and you get it back again. So we said, well...and<br />
then we got this used, copy graphic was it?<br />
<br />
David: Mm-hmm. Yep.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Typesetter. Found a young woman who knew typesetting and hired her.<br />
We bought our own stat camera. We always used to have to send all<br />
the stats and [inaudible 00:15:34] out to be made.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: That was huge then before...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Had our own darkroom.<br />
<br />
David: ...everything was computerized publishing. Yeah. We had our own<br />
darkroom and our own stat camera with the thing that goes over a<br />
screen basically to make it into dots.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: To do that. To make those negatives or [inaudible 00:15:56] , which<br />
are the positive. That was something again. You sent it out and you<br />
get it back.<br />
I said, "Oh, you know what, we got a little more type here than<br />
expected. We want to crop this. Well, we send it out again, and oh<br />
my gosh." Doing all of that in-house, but it cost money. In a<br />
sense, just for the hardware and capital improvements that you<br />
needed to do that.<br />
<br />
We were spending it on that and expansion into other things like<br />
the software. One of the other ones that I was thinking of that we<br />
did, that certainly, really didn't bring us any tangible reward,<br />
was that we were doing some consulting when we started developing<br />
software. We started doing consulting to places like the<br />
Exploratorium in San Francisco. And Sesame Place. That was a big<br />
one for us.<br />
<br />
Sesame Place was a theme park right in our own backyard in New<br />
Jersey. They were going to have these terminals that you could go<br />
up to. One of the programs was Mix and Match the Muppets. You could<br />
take different parts of Muppets and combine them. We wrote a part<br />
of that routine and a whole bunch of stuff that made computers and<br />
these things not computers but approachable things for kids.<br />
<br />
We did some work for the Capital Children's Museum in Washington<br />
and Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Again, did it help us?<br />
Maybe. Did we gain a little reputation? Maybe. Did it translate to<br />
the bottom line? Probably not. As Betsy said, it was fun for you to<br />
do that, wasn't it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, it was fun. It gave him fun things to do.<br />
<br />
David: That was one way that we, in a sense, spent some money.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It makes sense. You guys were the computer experts, probably by<br />
orders of magnitude. Who are they going to go to?<br />
<br />
David: That's right. Interactive games, yeah. I already had a good selling<br />
book out there that was visible, known. We did a lot of that kind<br />
of stuff. Some of it was just fun to do. Another place where we put<br />
I won't say a lot of money but we went to a lot of these shows,<br />
well, there were some that were strictly personal computer shows,<br />
but then also tried to push into things like the consumer<br />
electronics show.<br />
We were the only magazine at the consumer electronics. That's a<br />
huge, huge show. Twice a year, one in Chicago and one in Las Vegas.<br />
We'd take the smallest booth that you could but, still, it was a<br />
fair chunk of change to go to that, but that's how I felt we got<br />
the reach. They were pushing at a lower level. That was video games<br />
mostly at that point. Although we weren't in that market, I just<br />
felt that that was someplace that we wanted to be.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you think that was worthwhile?<br />
<br />
David: I don't know. We were mainly looking for retail stores to sell the<br />
magazine. That was my main purpose for going there. No, it probably<br />
wasn't. It probably was not and it cost us a lot of money to go to<br />
the shows. You have to experiment and do those things. We started<br />
reporting on new developments at the consumer electronics show and<br />
there was some overlap with Computer Inc but it was mostly video<br />
games. No, it didn't have a real good payoff. [laughs]<br />
Then there was the Boston show we went to where Betsy's feistiness<br />
really came out. You go to those shows. I'm not talking about one<br />
of these local computer shows or something. You go to a big show.<br />
You've got to use union labor. We had a computer at our booth. We<br />
wanted to plug it in. You're going to plug in your computer? No,<br />
you can't plug it in. You've got to hire an electrician for an hour<br />
for $75 to plug in your computer.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was a bit extreme. I don't think that was actually true.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know how much it was but you had to use union labor for<br />
different things. Betsy took exception to that at one show and<br />
actually came to blows.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was carrying stuff off the show floor. We were trying to get out.<br />
It was in Boston and we were going to drive back and we were trying<br />
to...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Go home at the end of the show?<br />
<br />
Betsy: ...go home at the end of the show. We were just carrying our<br />
cartons of leftover magazines and books and some union guy comes to<br />
me and starts telling me you can't do this and he was being very<br />
rude. So I punched him in the arm. [laughs] They were not happy.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you have to hire a special punching person to do that?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yes, exactly. I should have consulted with the shop steward before<br />
doing that.<br />
<br />
David: There was a follow-up to that. I'm not absolutely sure but I think<br />
the guy that was running that show was Shelley Adelman. He then<br />
approached us after that little incident. You can't do this. Betsy<br />
was really in his face about come on. We're a tiny little nit. Sure<br />
we can do it. We can carry our own stuff.<br />
Shelley Adelman, whose name you probably heard today, in a sense,<br />
got his start by running these smaller shows around the country and<br />
then he built up to running PC Expo in New York and Las Vegas and<br />
then he got into you run a show in Las Vegas you've got to make<br />
deals with the hotels and so on.<br />
<br />
The earlier PC shows in Las Vegas did not use the convention<br />
center. They were held in I think probably the Hilton. He got to<br />
know hotel people there and he started buying into hotels and today<br />
Shelley Adelman is huge. Not Caesars but he owns one of the really<br />
big casino operations. He's on Forbes list of top 100 wealthiest<br />
Americans.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sure he only uses union labor.<br />
<br />
David: I'm sure he does, absolutely. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's how he got where he is.<br />
<br />
David: We've crossed paths with some interesting people in different ways.<br />
There was another one I was thinking of. Actually, this is jumping<br />
around a little bit. Editorial, in different people submitting<br />
articles and then some people I would ask would you do something<br />
for us early, early on. That's another thing we went to. I went to<br />
comic cons and the sci-fi cons to promote the magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was early.<br />
<br />
David: That was early, very early. I've got to tell you one little<br />
incident there. I also went to small press publisher conventions. I<br />
went to one over Labor Day weekend, and I don't know what year it<br />
was. It was probably '75, '76 maybe. The place that they gave this<br />
small press to exhibit was one platform up in the subway under<br />
Lincoln Center.<br />
Lincoln Center, of course, huge, but down one level is not shops.<br />
There may be a few shops but it was a big, open platform. That's<br />
where we were exhibiting. I had my magazines out there on a table<br />
and I was talking to these other underground publishers and so on,<br />
typical.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's why they put you there. It's underground.<br />
<br />
David: Underground, yes. It was a Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Saturday,<br />
Sunday, Monday. I said, "I can't be here on Sunday." Talked to the<br />
person next to me and I said, "I'm just going to leave a cigar box<br />
that says put your money in the box." He said, "You're nuts. We're<br />
in a New York subway system. You're going to come back with nothing<br />
in your box." I left a bunch of change in it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: And your ex-wife said you were too trusting.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] Yes. I left like 15 single dollar bills in there so people<br />
could make change and I just left it there, from Saturday to Monday<br />
and I came back Monday, about $40, $50 in the box. I don't know<br />
whether it paid for everything that was taken but it worked out<br />
fine. Yes, I was obviously too trusting, but at roughly the same<br />
time there was something going on. I think it was a sci-fi<br />
convention or world future society. Yeah, it was world future<br />
society convention.<br />
They had some notable people there. I was sitting down with Alvin<br />
Toffler in the lobby of the Colosseum and along comes over to us<br />
Isaac [inaudible 00:27:03] (ED: from context, they are talking about<br />
Isaac Asimov). What a wonderful little party. We had some coffee in<br />
the Colosseum and I said, "Isaac, can you write me an article?"<br />
"I got a good story from the robot series that hasn't been widely<br />
used or published and you can use that." So I got an early <br />
contribution from Isaac [inaudible 00:27:27] and Alvin<br />
Toffler wrote something for us.<br />
<br />
Anyway, got to know some interesting people at that point. Then who<br />
should submit an article, and by this time Betsy was the editor...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Out of transom comes an article from Michael Creighton. It was a<br />
program. I can't remember what it was about.<br />
<br />
David: For the Apple.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was a program for the Apple, but it was something really dumb.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know if you remember, we were reminded when Harry Garland<br />
was up at the thing in Seattle. Harry Garland was one of the first<br />
ones to produce an independent manufactured a board, a 100 bus<br />
board, for the Altair, and this was really early, and he called it<br />
the TV Dazzler. It made little squares light up but he could make<br />
lots of them light up in different colors or just a few. It was a<br />
silly program but people said we can do graphics on this.<br />
He eventually developed it into quite an interesting graphics tool,<br />
I guess. People did buy the TV Dazzler for itself but the purpose<br />
was here's a board you could produce graphics, do some graphics. In<br />
any event, that's essentially what Michael Creighton's program did<br />
for the Apple. Not much.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This was not early on.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, it was after the Apple 2 was out.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was probably...<br />
<br />
David: '80.<br />
<br />
Betsy: 1980, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you publish it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. I rejected it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: I'm like we're going to reject an article from Michael Creighton?<br />
<br />
Betsy: We both liked Michael Creighton as an article.<br />
<br />
David: Oh my gosh. But we did. We really did. We had standards.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Later on, though, he wrote something. It was better. It wasn't<br />
great. He did write something better and we did accept it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Orson Scott Card wrote for Compute, I think. I don't know if he was<br />
Orson Scott Card at that point, but [inaudible 00:30:00] .<br />
<br />
David: We've crossed paths with some people.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [inaudible 00:30:09] was actually very nice<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, 6 foot 8, big guy. He was very nice. Unfortunately, he died.<br />
On the other end of things, early on, we really were...this was<br />
probably even before Betsy got in...kind of in the small press<br />
underground publishing movement as much as in the legitimate big<br />
magazines, because that's kind of where I started.<br />
<br />
Betsy: When I came, we had just published the first sleek, coated paper<br />
magazine and coated stock. In October 1978, I believe, that was<br />
published. That was the first of the coated stock. That was kind of<br />
the bridge to legitimacy.<br />
<br />
David: For the first two years, [inaudible 00:31:09] news print and I had<br />
a little tie in with some of the small press people. I was learning<br />
about publishing from small press review, I got to know some of the<br />
people who were doing successful publishing. A lot of them were<br />
magazines and comics out of San Francisco.<br />
So I got to know a little bit [inaudible 00:31:46] and Gilbert<br />
Shelton and Sherry Flannigan, and some of those early, Bobby<br />
London. So anyway, one ad we ran real early on was an adaptation of<br />
Renee and Robert Crompton. Go ahead and change my thing to creative<br />
computing. Go for it. Sherry Flannigan she did a comic strip called<br />
Tronch and Bonnie, Tronch was a little dog and Bonnie was a little<br />
girl and they occasionally got mixed up with a robot dog.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there some sort of falling out with that person?<br />
<br />
David: With Sherry? No. I'm still friends with her on Facebook. They had a<br />
major, major problem, she was involved with Gary Hallgrin and I<br />
forget who the publisher was, McNeil, Bobby London. They were the<br />
Air Pirates funniest group that Disney took to task, that caused<br />
the death of a lot of publishing in the underground comics<br />
movement.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I don't understand.<br />
<br />
David: Air Pirates were funny, they were just looking for trouble. They<br />
had Disney characters flying planes and getting into all kinds of<br />
trouble and getting into problems that Disney characters never<br />
would have done, sexual problems as well as just acting badly.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Disney just said, "We can't put up with this." It was an<br />
interesting case, because was it a copyright violation, not really<br />
because they were character look-a-likes, but they weren't calling<br />
them Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck but they looked the same or very<br />
similar. But, it was a landmark case in underground comics, it<br />
caused a lot of them to pull back, a lot on the satire and stuff<br />
that they were publishing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I asked about Sherry because a number of years ago when I had first<br />
put the best of [inaudible 00:34:29] on my website, then after a<br />
while I got an email saying, "Look, you have to take this<br />
[inaudible 00:34:37] ." I would copyright all, it was just like<br />
waving arms. So I took it down but it was, I thought, maybe it<br />
was...<br />
<br />
David: Well that whole copyright trademark thing, there interpretation<br />
that really, really strict...everything that goes on the Internet<br />
is a public domain. Well, that is not really true either. Are you<br />
making money from copyrighted material? If you are then that's a<br />
pretty clear violation. Are you affecting the copyright owners<br />
ability to make money with it? That's a violation.<br />
I'm kind of in this right now with Uruguay and TinTin, those books<br />
have inspired a lot of people to make parodies and fake TinTin<br />
covers. TinTin at the beach, places TinTin wouldn't normally go.<br />
Well is it affecting the sales of TinTin books, or is it actually<br />
increasingly them?<br />
<br />
Casterman, who owns and [inaudible 00:36:07] owns the TinTin<br />
copyrights. They are really going after some of these people, but<br />
I'm not sure that they have a really good case. So some people take<br />
everything off and don't want nothing on the website. And others<br />
are saying, "Hey, this is legitimate." I have collected a lot of<br />
those covers, and put them up on a website.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I guess you'll find out soon enough.<br />
<br />
David: I will find out, soon enough.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They may not be right legally, but how hard do you want to fight<br />
it.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: I think that they have to demonstrate that it's hurting them in<br />
some way. One last thing, from the question you asked yesterday,<br />
back to the money issue, when I sold the magazine, right at that<br />
time I took 15 percent of what I had received, and donated it to<br />
charities. I have in a sense signed on, although not as an official<br />
signee to the Gates-Buffet initiative to give away half of my<br />
wealth, while I am alive.<br />
At one point in time you can compute that, I have already given<br />
away more than I have received for Creative Computing to Charity.<br />
Of course, it had grown a little bit and we made reasonably decent<br />
investments and that is why it continued to grow. But, I'm really<br />
committed to doing that. My kids are not going to inherit it all.<br />
That's just the way it is, that is the way I believe. Put my money<br />
where my heart is. Anyway,<br />
<br />
Kevin: Other question is, you said something yesterday, I should follow up<br />
that one. You said something about stealing Basic.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well there was this big thing. Just the night before last, at this<br />
dinner we went to, where all the people who were at the first MITS<br />
conference and they referred to the letter that Bill Gates wrote.<br />
<br />
Kevin: "Why are you stealing my software?"<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well exactly. That was just a reference to that Bill Gates, which<br />
had just been brought back to my memory by that. People were<br />
telling stories at this. Instead of having an after dinner speaker<br />
they were just passing the mic around and people were talking about<br />
incidents and things from the past.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you get to sell the story to this group of...?<br />
<br />
David: Not really, I was just followed up on something [inaudible<br />
00:39:24] .<br />
<br />
Betsy: Some of those stories were really boring.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: Oh yeah, long and boring. It's an interesting thing though, about<br />
basic itself, but it was developed at an educational institution<br />
originally by Kemeny and Kurtz at Dartmouth. And they, either<br />
deliberately or because they had gotten a lot of grant money from<br />
General Electric in the early time sharing systems, they basically<br />
let anybody use their Basic.<br />
It was developed at Dartmouth but later Honeywell put a system in<br />
at Minnesota or Florida or someplace else. They could use Basic,<br />
they could have a no license fee or anything. That made Basic a<br />
universal language that was available, at least that version of<br />
Basic. If you write a different version of Basic, where does that<br />
fall? These are some sort of violation and you need some<br />
permission. And basically Kemeny and Kurtz said, "No, you don't."<br />
And they allowed Basic to be used and developed by others.<br />
<br />
Digital Equipment, at the same time, maybe even earlier, but<br />
roughly the same time, had developed also an interactive language<br />
called Focal. And Focal in many regards was more efficient than<br />
Basic, because they were running it on many computer and there was<br />
less memory to work with. On the other hand, and this was true<br />
Digital...as time went on, they said, "No, nobody can use Focal. We<br />
are not going to let, especially those people [inaudible 00:41:59]<br />
." But any place else, nobody could use Focal.<br />
<br />
I think it wound up with a situation like Sony and Betamax. Sony<br />
saying, "Betamax is ours and it is a better format that VHS," which<br />
it was. But then, JVC saying, "We have VHS and Toshiba. Hey do you<br />
want to use it? Fine, we'll license it to you for next to nothing."<br />
<br />
Kevin: You think Focal could have been Basic.<br />
<br />
David: I think it could have been very big. I think it could there could<br />
have been very serious competition between the two languages, but<br />
by Digital limiting it only to their own computers and specifically<br />
to their mini computers, not even the big mainframes, it really<br />
limited the spread of Focal. In fact, it forced me to go out to the<br />
developers and people in educational institutions they wanted<br />
Basic.<br />
There were few schools and colleges in Boston area, near DEC that<br />
were OK with Focal. But stuff was getting published by Minnesota<br />
Educational Computer Consortium and others in Basic, [inaudible<br />
00:43:32] computer project. So they wanted Basic. [laughs] I had to<br />
go on. I hired one group, actually it turned out to be just an<br />
individual guy in Brooklyn that developed a Basic for 4KPDP8. Well<br />
Basic took 3.5K, I gave you 500 words, 512 bit not even the 16 bit,<br />
at least get 2 bits per...but 500 words the right programs. Wasn't<br />
much.<br />
<br />
So that forced Lunar Lander and [inaudible 00:44:15] and some of<br />
those programs actually. Some of them I imported over from Focal<br />
into Basic. And then we had a machine that had 8K. We had a<br />
different version of Basic because Hewlett Packard had a machine<br />
that read cards, mark sense cards. We had to have a different<br />
version of basic for that. Then we had a timeshare Basic. We had<br />
six versions of Basic, five actually on the PDP8 family. It was<br />
absurd, it was crazy, but we had to do it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I was going to ask you, the process of like...you started<br />
saying...you interrupted yourself. You said, "People would submit<br />
articles and then..." I don't know what you were going to say next.<br />
But [inaudible 00:45:08] that I wanted to ask you like just the<br />
process of how the magazine got made. You got an article was,<br />
somebody just typed up or something and...<br />
<br />
Betsy: You mean the mechanics of the production?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We can receive most of the articles for the magazine came over the<br />
transom. And we would get these articles and our editorial system<br />
would log them in and pass them around to editorial staff. John<br />
Anderson and Russell [inaudible 00:45:42] .<br />
<br />
David: Peter Fee.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Peter Fee.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What does it mean over the transom?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Means they weren't solicited. Somebody in the middle of the night<br />
jumped to know [laughs] or through the mailbox. We put a little<br />
piece of paper on there and the guys would write their opinions.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] That is serious.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Some of the things they said. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Like what? What would they say?<br />
<br />
Betsy: "Don't quit your day job." [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: And then they had the rubber stamp.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Somebody found a stamp. Everything that we had was used, including<br />
our desk and everything. And somebody found, at the back of the<br />
desk, a stamp. It said San Marcos on it. This was like the ultimate<br />
insult. [laughs] San Marcos, like you know, "Get out of here."<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Send it to San Marcos?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Send it to San Marcos, wherever that was. Ultimately, I would make<br />
the final decision whether we were going to publish this or not.<br />
Once we were well established, the vast majority of them went back.<br />
We never returned manuscripts. And they would come with piles of<br />
code. A lot of them were programs and, we would decide and the<br />
editorial assistants job to notify the person. Then we bought all<br />
rights, didn't we?<br />
<br />
David: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
Betsy: North American Serial rights, that's what we bought for everything.<br />
Then they would go into a cube. Sometimes we would say something,<br />
"Oh, this is going to go really well with this educational<br />
institute that we're doing in June," Like that one is for June or<br />
just put it in the queue and we will see when it comes or rises to<br />
the top or whatever.<br />
The more technical editors like, John Anderson, he was our best guy<br />
ever. They would go through the code and make sure the code worked,<br />
and I would edit them for content and correct them.<br />
<br />
David: For English and Grammar.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, with a pen and pencil. Then they would go to our typesetter.<br />
Typesetter would correct them. And then they would come back, and I<br />
think, our lower level editorial assistant would proofread them,<br />
but proofread a lot of them too. When they came out typesetter, it<br />
was on a smooth shiny paper.<br />
<br />
David: Photographic paper.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And then, if they had screenshots or anything the art department<br />
would make them into photo stats or [inaudible 00:49:02] . And then<br />
when it was time for them to go to press they would put them on<br />
boards, pieces of cardboard, white paper...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So you paste up?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, they do the paste up and put it on there.<br />
<br />
David: The boards were using non reproducing blue on its photograph. They<br />
had different outlines, blue defined columns, both two and three<br />
column pages and upper limits and page numbers and all that kind of<br />
stuff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: We were still doing it on [inaudible 00:49:43] newspaper in 1990.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well that's exactly it, so you know what we're talking about. And<br />
then once you get it all together and then again somebody has got<br />
to read it to make sure there is no lines left out, particularly of<br />
the programs. Make sure that those all still make sense. There were<br />
many cases where line got left out or artists cuts off a things and<br />
realizes, "Oh, I mean to cut it short." And that whole line<br />
disappears and then you send it off to be printed and all the<br />
subscribers get a little upset because Startrek doesn't run.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: So that sort of thing happened frequently or often?<br />
<br />
David: With typeset material, not much at all. But with program listings,<br />
program listings were really tough. Because you would have people<br />
that would submit something, and they'd have a really cheap, low-<br />
end dot matrix printer. And we always encouraged people, if you're<br />
going to submit a program, submit it in some machine-readable form.<br />
So we don't want to type them all in to make sure they work. Even<br />
though our readers are going to have to, but we don't want to have<br />
to do that. So send us. But even so, we might then print it off on<br />
one of our slightly higher end printers. But I'll tell you what,<br />
you have page breaks and everything else. And the Art department<br />
didn't have a clue about programs and stuff. The program would get<br />
stated down. We weren't using the full sized type for program<br />
listings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. At that point we hadn't the ability to make them fit.<br />
<br />
David: That's where the most common place that you'd lose a line or<br />
something. It would get photographed, and when it's coming out of a<br />
line printer, you might have one or two lines on the following<br />
page. "Oh, we forgot that."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Personally, I know it said so much about magazine that when it<br />
continued, there were just sometimes a handwritten area going,<br />
"Continued over here." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Oh, absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was a early.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It wasn't professional, and that was awesome. It was just like,<br />
"OK."<br />
<br />
Betsy: Then what we would do, we would request when we...we would solicit<br />
articles. Like if there was a new Apple peripheral that we wanted<br />
to review, we'd get the product. Then a lot of times, our own guys<br />
wanted to review the stuff, but if it was something that we didn't<br />
have time for, or that was better suited to one of our freelancers,<br />
we would send it out and ask for a review of it.<br />
A lot of reviews came in over the transom too, but we tried to be<br />
careful of those, that they were not either trying to justify their<br />
own purchase of whatever it was or get even with the publisher for<br />
producing it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Or written by the... [crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: That really wasn't an issue at the time, it was a more innocent<br />
time. That really didn't happen much, but it was, sometimes, people<br />
would get a product they didn't care for and totally bash it, then<br />
we have to go and figure out is it really that bad. We tend to not<br />
produce seriously negative...if it was a really bad product we just<br />
ignored it.<br />
<br />
David: We tried to be objective with reviews, but before I got into the<br />
computer field at all I was in market research. There are a number<br />
of biases, too, that really overwhelmingly affect all kinds of<br />
market research polls or surveys. One is that people think they're<br />
better than they are. For example, if we were doing a poll or a<br />
research study, we'd put a question on basically designed to show<br />
the executives who were using this data that there were some<br />
biases.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He's not talking about Creative Computing.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: No, no. This was way earlier. I'm talking about Proctor and Gamble<br />
products or general foods or that kind of thing. Anyways, the<br />
question we put on was "please rank your driving ability," and we<br />
had from well below average, accident waiting to happen up to Mario<br />
Andretti, Danica Patrick, over there. And you know what, 99 percent<br />
of the population ranked themselves better than the average. Where<br />
is your average then? Its way high.<br />
The other thing, equally pervasive in a sense, is that people<br />
wanted to justify a decision, a purchase decision. In fact, back<br />
the 30s, the slogan for Ford Motor Company was ask a man that owns<br />
one. You ask a man that owns and has made a decision to buy this<br />
car, he's going to say "Yeah, it is the greatest car." So you put<br />
on questions, again, throwaway questions.<br />
<br />
If you had this, or if you were an owner of whatever car it is that<br />
you have. "What do you have now? Would you buy another one?" People<br />
"Oh, yes. This is a great decision. I love this car." I'll tell you<br />
where you can find out, is you look at what percentage of people<br />
that did own that particular car did buy another one? They're<br />
always way lower than they those that say they would buy another<br />
one. It gets more pronounced with higher prices.<br />
<br />
If you've made a decision to buy a high-priced car, you're going to<br />
think, "I'll tell you what. This Land Rover was the best car I have<br />
ever bought." 78 percent of people might say, "I'm going to buy<br />
another one." About 15 percent of the people actually do.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So [inaudible 00:56:49] magazine because people want to justify a<br />
review.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. That's exactly right. And as Betsy said, it could go the<br />
other way, too. "I think I'm getting screwed here with this product<br />
and I'm going to knock it." When you get reviews, in essence, over<br />
the transom, they're either justifying, "This was really wonderful.<br />
I made a great decision buying this particular product," or "I hate<br />
it." It's hard to know whether the review was really objective and<br />
realistic.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you ever push-back from advertisers?<br />
<br />
David: All the time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Can you tell me?<br />
<br />
Betsy: We would feel the pushback from our ad sales people. They would say<br />
"So and so is annoyed with you because you didn't put it." We very<br />
rarely put anybody's totally negative reviews, but we tried to be<br />
objective, and not every product is perfect. Almost every product<br />
is going to have some negative feature.<br />
We would put those in and the advertisers would then go to their ad<br />
rep and complain. Then the ad rep would come to us and say, "Why<br />
are you doing this? These people are mad. I have to sell them ads."<br />
We would just say "Separation of church and State. You are<br />
advertising in this magazine because it's a credible magazine, and<br />
if we let you push us around, it won't be credible anymore, and<br />
then it will reflect on your ad."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you remember anyone ever pulling ads [inaudible 00:58:39] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't, offhand. Do you?<br />
<br />
David: No, but I can tell you the opposite. There were a couple of<br />
magazines that almost ran manufactured press releases as product<br />
reviews. They did get more advertising than we did from some<br />
manufacturers that liked that. I hate to name names, but Compute<br />
Magazine. I don't think you'll find any negative reviews in Compute<br />
Magazine. Everything was the greatest thing since sliced bread.<br />
Personal Computing, similar, very positive. "Gee whiz" reviews on<br />
almost all the things that they saw. It just isn't that way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You have talked about [inaudible 00:59:49] . We've talked briefly<br />
at least about the other magazines. Sync, the one about Timex<br />
Sinclair. I understand the allure of publishing a magazine geared<br />
to a specific system, but why did you pick Timex Sinclair? [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Probably two reasons. One is that we had more of a presence in<br />
England than most of the other magazines.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Still do.<br />
<br />
David: We had a very early agreement with David Tebbet, who was the co-<br />
publisher of Personal Computer, something-or-other. It might have<br />
been Personal Computer World. Yes, it was.<br />
<br />
Betsy Ahi: Yes it was Personal Computer World, and when PC world started they<br />
had to call it PC World because there was already a Personal<br />
Computer World in England.<br />
<br />
David: And we had an agreement that they would reprint materials from<br />
Creative Computing, which they did for a while but then they<br />
developed their own in-house capabilities and there was enough<br />
differences. We went to England and very early on had an agent in<br />
England that we could take subscriptions.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A housewife who kept her dark issues in her spare bathroom.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we still know her. Hazel Greaves, Hazy. Anyway, so we were<br />
getting enough subscriptions from England. We were sending over, I<br />
don't know how they packaged them up, but they call them Mbags, M-<br />
bags, mail bags basically of magazines, then we mail them from<br />
England. So I had more of our connection with British market than<br />
probably any of the other magazines, we definitely did.<br />
And so I get to know Clarkson Clair and what's going on over there.<br />
And then when they bring over the computer to this country and<br />
Timex, my God, big outfit. They were going to market it. By that<br />
time you know, there was no point starting a [inaudible 01:02:25]<br />
magazine or an entire magazine. They were, Or Apple, they were<br />
already existed. So maybe this is going to be the next big one. We<br />
will be right there when they start and we were.<br />
<br />
Timex actually put, what we had simple, simple sink or something<br />
but it was in the package with the computer. So that was one way of<br />
getting our subscriber base and we couldn't possibly afford to<br />
advertise and do direct mailings for magazine like that. But they<br />
were in essence helping us go on. So that's why it is pretty<br />
successful actually. Often, we were making money on the magazine<br />
mainly because we didn't have to promote it.<br />
<br />
If we had to get subscriptions, we could not have possibly made it<br />
work. There wasn't enough advertising really. I don't know what the<br />
issue here was, but it was not as good as we would have liked it.<br />
The magazine would have been tiny if we maintained the same<br />
advertising to edit ratio we would have liked. But we didn't lose<br />
money out of it but we didn't make anything out of it either. I<br />
think it was a breakeven proposition.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Microsystems. [inaudible 01:04:09] .<br />
<br />
David: I said there was a lot of early development in New Jersey and there<br />
was a guy named Saul Libes, you will find him probably, [laughs]<br />
who was the first president of the Armature Computer Group in New<br />
Jersey. He was a Professor at [inaudible 01:04:43] College and he<br />
felt that Byte magazine started out fine but then they were<br />
focusing more on assembled hardware and things that were already<br />
made.<br />
So he wanted to get down on really lower level of do it yourself,<br />
build it yourself. Microsystems was more like Byte was in the very<br />
beginning, focusing on circuit diagram, this was logic in PC's and<br />
everything.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There first name was S100, Microsystems<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, S100 perhaps then it became Microsystems in '78 or '79. When<br />
some of the others came out they started [inaudible 01:05:45] 6800<br />
and 68,000 chips from Motorola. But I would say it was a really<br />
techy magazine and it was one that I think probably killed that one<br />
off.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was dead before [inaudible 01:06:05] . [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: It might have been. I don't know, but it was...<br />
<br />
Betsy: S100 bus did not survive and to the [inaudible 01:06:12] .<br />
<br />
David: It was dead before as there was these eras and the do it yourself<br />
S100 era,that was '75 to '78. Then it kind of had a downward spiral<br />
of two or three years and it was gone. Well, maybe it wasn't gone<br />
but it wasn't the same. And so Microsystems was tuned into that and<br />
they were running hardcore stuff.<br />
And the reason that Saul...we reach an agreement with him to<br />
publish it, is basically he didn't have any real magazine<br />
background. We thought we could do something with it. It turned out<br />
not to be a good fit bit we published it for a while. I don't know<br />
if we made money or lost money on that. Probably it didn't make<br />
anything. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Small business computers or computing.<br />
<br />
David: What?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Small business computers? Who do we buy that from? I can't even<br />
remember. You can't even remember that we had it, I can tell by the<br />
look on your face<br />
<br />
David: I can<br />
<br />
Betsy: That one of my brothers...my brother was a publisher remember?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I don't know who or where we got it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That just fall into grave or...?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Eventually, but that we post it for a while. I think is something<br />
that somebody basically left on our door step.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think it was kind of like a puppy on the... [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: I think it came with your brother.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, because my brother wasn't into publishing until after clearing<br />
college.<br />
<br />
David: It sounded like a good idea at the time.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think we saw a future in business computing<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we did and unfortunately that was one word as if they just<br />
want...I mentioned yesterday that they wanted to really shift the<br />
focus of Creative Computing away from home and broaden out and<br />
shifted into the small business market. And just did not, it was an<br />
uncomfortable fit. We would've been better to have a separate<br />
magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember where we got Small Business Computing from or<br />
where it went.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know, either.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But I know that obviously it wasn't a huge acquisition.<br />
<br />
David: It was a footnote.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A footnote in the story. [laughs]<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Actually, a bigger acquisition was earlier and that was Rom<br />
Magazine. Rom was published by who?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Erik Sandberg-Diment.<br />
<br />
David: Right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: D-I-M-E-N-T.<br />
<br />
David: Connecticut. He did a nice job with the magazine, very nice job<br />
with it. Published nine issues and a little different focus than<br />
Creative but it really overlapped us very nicely. He had more<br />
graphic stuff. In fact, it was through him that I got to know<br />
George Baker and some of the people up there. The other guy that<br />
did the pixelated blocks photos. You've seen those.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The Einstein.<br />
<br />
David: [crosstalk] The Lincoln with block pics.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Block pics.<br />
<br />
David: Block pics. OK, he and George Baker sort of came as a package with<br />
Rom, they knew of each other. We actually, I would say, four or<br />
five issues, ran Rom as a whole separate section and even set it on<br />
the cover of Creative Computing and Rom. Then it became evident...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think that was because he had a whole other editorial kicking<br />
around. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We bought.<br />
<br />
David: Could be. And then we would just merge it in completely, but that<br />
was a very good fit. It brought us more editorial than it did<br />
subscribers. They did not have a big subscriber base, but it was a<br />
nice marriage in a sense.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Video and Arcade Games only published I think four issues.<br />
<br />
David: Three.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Three?<br />
<br />
David: Actually, three but if you've got a hold of the third one, you're<br />
doing well. I think Ziff cut that off after two real issues got<br />
mailed out. We did a third one but it wasn't sent out to<br />
subscribers.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My website only has two issues.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. There were only two that really were distributed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So I have...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: A goal. [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, if you can get a hold of the third one. [laughter] I don't<br />
even have that. There's a same thing on Tarry-on. There were three<br />
issues of Tarry-on that I did not keep the third issue. Oh, man.<br />
Shoot me.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: But Video and Arcade Games, there were at least five or six other<br />
magazines focusing on that. Talk about magazines that were running<br />
non-objective manufacture-provided reviews, all the others were. I,<br />
maybe, convinced myself and some people at Davis that there was a<br />
need for really objective...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ziff? Did Ziff do that?<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Were we with Ziff when we did that?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah. That was a late one. So we said, let's...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Continue it through.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, that was definitely. Let's do it. But again...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not only that but it was going to be fun.<br />
<br />
David: It was going to be a lot of fun. [laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: So why did it fail?<br />
<br />
David: OK, again you got to look at the eras and what was happening.<br />
Arcade games then really were on the decline. Video arcades where<br />
you go in and pop a quarter in, because there was so much more<br />
capability in the home computers and the [inaudible 01:12:55] and<br />
the Mattel and the different home systems. They could do all now,<br />
not as much, but you get a pretty darned good game that you could<br />
take home with you and not have to pop a quarter in the slot every<br />
time you play.<br />
So arcade games were kind of on the downward spiral, so that<br />
eliminated a lot of potential advertising. We weren't going to get<br />
any advertising from Nameco and all of the producers of the arcade<br />
games, which was, "Hey, it is advertising along with..." And the<br />
other home producers of the game, there were four or five magazines<br />
already that they were pouring money into. They didn't really want<br />
another one.<br />
<br />
So it was advertising that or just lack of advertising that killed<br />
that off. We just couldn't get it. I think there was still a need<br />
for what we had sort of in a sense proposed to do of objectively<br />
reviewing games and secondly, we're telling people how to play<br />
them.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, it was strategies.<br />
<br />
David: Strategies. It was advertising that we just didn't have, couldn't<br />
get.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:14:28] Atari explored and Atari I think we've covered<br />
pretty well.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Military vehicles, which we talked about.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] Yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So the other magazines, Byte and [inaudible 01:14:45] , was it<br />
rivalry? Was it friendly competition?<br />
<br />
David: Byte, we were in bed together. Not in bed together, but we<br />
published the best of Byte. Creative Computing did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: For awhile.<br />
<br />
David: Well, just one.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. That wasn't that friendly a rivalry. It wasn't that friendly<br />
after awhile.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't friendly once they sold to McGraw Hill, and they sold<br />
early. Then everything was off. We did some joint promotions with<br />
Byte for hardware creative software. We ran the ads for each other<br />
for a short time.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's when McGraw Hill cutoff.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] In a heartbeat. No more of that.<br />
<br />
David: We felt that basically we weren't even competing for the same<br />
advertisers. Just a few, but not really. Certainly, we were not in<br />
direct competition at all with Byte. So that was just kind of all<br />
in the same place and you're going in a hardware direction, we're<br />
going on the software.<br />
When Wayne Green threw this intrigue with his wife and everything<br />
else, lost Byte Magazine. He was fit to be tied. "I'm going to kill<br />
them!" and he started Kilobyte. It wasn't killable. It was Kilobyte<br />
for I don't know how many issues.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not many.<br />
<br />
David: 1000 bytes. [laughter] and a kilobyte, it had a dual meaning there.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: That was a ferocious and very nasty. Oh, horrible rivalry. Somebody<br />
early on forced him not to use the name byte at all.<br />
<br />
Betsy: So it was byte.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: So they changed it to Kilobaud.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Which didn't mean anything.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: No.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So did you have a relationship with Wayne?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Nobody had a relationship with... [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Nobody really had a relationship. I knew him, of course. He was<br />
going his own way. Now the one area actually where we got into more<br />
competition with him than in the magazine itself, because again, he<br />
was trying to be like Byte, hardware oriented and he published 73<br />
magazines so he was basically focusing on the ham radio people, the<br />
do it yourselfers and so on. But they started a software division.<br />
It was pretty good. They had a lot of the same types of software<br />
that we did on cassette tape.<br />
In any event, we really had more of a head to head rivalry on the<br />
software than in the magazine publishing. We never really had<br />
anything to do with the magazine products or books. They also<br />
published some books but more like the magazine hardware type of<br />
thing. We weren't quite as selective, but our book publishing we<br />
did get into things that weren't in the magazine. We published<br />
books with more of a hardware orientation. We had a little broader<br />
line of books than the type of things that we had in the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I don't know if you want to open this can of worms, but you said to<br />
me in an email, "You couldn't find two people whose vision,<br />
philosophy, ethics, and view of business and life was further apart<br />
than Wayne and I." Can you elaborate on that? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was just basically unpleasant, is my take on him. I didn't know<br />
him that well but it was just sort of like he had a chip on his<br />
shoulder and was daring you to knock it off. Wouldn't you say?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You knew him before I did but by the time I arrived on the scene<br />
that was just sort of the general industry perception of him, I<br />
think. It was just stay away from him, leave him alone, he's not<br />
very nice.<br />
<br />
David: Well, one other thing, which we sort of touched on a couple of<br />
times, I'm very trusting. [laughter] Overly so, according to my ex-<br />
wife and I think there would be a couple of examples. Wayne would<br />
walk out of that door, boy, out of sight, 'you're going to do<br />
something to screw him' is what his view would be. He did not trust<br />
anybody.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] And least of all, his ex wife.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: It's the old saying, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean<br />
that somebody isn't out to get you." He thought everyone was out to<br />
get him, everybody. So we were totally philosophically different.<br />
Our ways of doing business were different. I shake hands with you,<br />
we have an agreement. You don't shake hands with Wayne.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't think his employees were ever happy either.<br />
<br />
David: Oh!<br />
<br />
Betsy: You talked to them and it shows. He didn't have like a great...<br />
<br />
David: Rapport.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well it was not. The culture of his organization I don't think was<br />
particularly, I think it was probably permeated with this lack of<br />
trust.<br />
<br />
David: Well, one thing, we had fun. We really did have fun at Creative<br />
Computing. Perhaps some of the editorial staff, too much. There was<br />
one point where Betsy had to away their...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well they were all young guys. Some of them even still in high<br />
school, they would play games for hours and hours and hours, long<br />
after the reviews were done. It was one, self-contained thing that<br />
played football, and they played it for hours. I had to take it<br />
away from them. Like "don't make me be your mother"<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there any drug culture at all? If you read [inaudible 01:22:17]<br />
and he was cocaine and high everyday and popped...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not that we knew of. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: The East coast was quite different.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No there was nothing, really. I don't think so. In fact, my client<br />
John Anderson and Peter Fee, they were actually kind of protective<br />
of me in a lot of ways. I can remember being in John's office and<br />
they were talking about a movie or something like that. John said,<br />
"No, you wouldn't like this movie, don't go to this movie." That<br />
kind of thing, they were funny guys. They just kept laughing. David<br />
Lubar. They were free spirits but they were very funny, talented<br />
guys.<br />
<br />
David: He is coming out with a line of children's books, weird, weird<br />
stuff. The last one, something about the lawn mower weenies. He has<br />
a line of 6 or 8, and they're all little short stories. Some of<br />
them were adaptations of stuff that almost got published in<br />
Creative Computing, probably some of them did. Lubar is a funny<br />
guy. When he left and went to work for one of the video gaming<br />
companies, his first big successful game was "Worm Wars." You were<br />
like, "Worm Wars?" [laughs]<br />
Other people are fighting real serious warrior and you are fighting<br />
with worms. We just had a different kind of culture, a lot of fun.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Jonny Anderson went to work for A plus in San Francisco. He was one<br />
of the five people killed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1986.<br />
He was in a car and a piece of the building fell on the car. He was<br />
a really funny guy.<br />
<br />
David: We did not have a serious business culture.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, we had this great big room with a bunch of tables set up around<br />
the edges, in the middle. It was kind of like that, nowhere near as<br />
neat.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I will clean that up for you.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] Just tangles of wires, and we had to have one of every<br />
kind of computer so we can test all the software, and this one<br />
would be running this kind of peripheral, and it was like a young<br />
guys dream job.<br />
<br />
David: You commented yesterday about how we had a bunch of high school,<br />
not quite, but still...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I said that they were in their early 20s but they basically had the<br />
maturity of high school students, they needed a little bit of<br />
mothering. But I wasn't that myself. They were just really nice<br />
guys, we did a good job hiring those kids.<br />
<br />
David: When you talk about the Atari cultures and some of the others,<br />
where every Friday some of these companies have parties, that kind<br />
of thing. We had an annual party, a picnic. We didn't need weekly<br />
parties and stuff to let you have fun because that stuff was going<br />
on every day, not really partying but playing the games and<br />
bantering and everything else.<br />
As they say, at Washington, a real efficient business culture.<br />
Heck, I didn't work for Digital Equipment, which was still a pretty<br />
relaxed place, but AT&T which was anything but. This is as far away<br />
from that kind of corporate culture as you can get, but it worked.<br />
Didn't make a lot of money, but it worked.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:26:58]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. And I think they appreciated it because they weren't making<br />
tons of money either, but they were having a lot of fun. They<br />
enjoyed going to work, they really enjoyed it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Speaking of Kindle, I've done it but haven't told anybody yet that<br />
best of Creative Computing too is now available on Kindle. And I<br />
have been working backwards. [crosstalk] I just had it on sale.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I haven't publicized it yet for sale.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They won't let you do. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah, I think they will have two.<br />
<br />
David: Did you do that through Amazon? How do you convert is to Kindle?<br />
I scan them and then I do CRM and I use Elance or utilize some<br />
service in India that converts it back to ASCII, and then they<br />
convert it into an E-book from there. It's a lot of work, I want it<br />
done well, and I want it to be super awesome. And they just<br />
[inaudible 01:28:40] , like we were talking about before.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Outsourcing and stuff. But I can do it myself but that would take<br />
way too long. So I just try to do the quality control [inaudible<br />
01:28:49] . It's not perfect but better than nothing.<br />
<br />
David: I have reached the point where with my Dodge restoration book, that<br />
yes, many of the borders around the pictures are terrible, they're<br />
hand drawn and so on. But I'm not going to bother to re-do that, I<br />
just want take the book, get it into some sort of machine readable<br />
format, PDF or something. [inaudible 01:29:24] somebody that can...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah, I can get you off with that. We can then figure it out.<br />
<br />
David: I found one extra one that I can cut up.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That will help a lot. [inaudible 01:29:37] . If you want to sell a<br />
PDF of it, that would be up in couple of day. That's easy, but a<br />
searchable Kindle version that takes longer.<br />
<br />
David: I don't want a Kindle version because people want to print out<br />
something that they can...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Take out to the garage<br />
<br />
David: When people slide under the vehicle they have it there, "Oh, OK<br />
this is what I should be looking for."<br />
<br />
Kevin: If you scan it and upload it to Amazon, even create space from<br />
[inaudible 01:30:06] company, then there could actually be another<br />
book, that looks pretty identical to the first one. We will figure<br />
out.<br />
Do you [inaudible 01:30:23] ? But are you familiar with...?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Are there any?<br />
<br />
Kevin: There are but they are very different than Creative.<br />
<br />
David: Somebody out there said, "What did you read today?" The only<br />
magazines that I will occasionally pick up in the computer field<br />
are mostly from England, Internet magazines, well there are<br />
several, which is sort of interesting that the dominant Internet<br />
magazines come from England, but they do.<br />
If I want to do something, and I haven't lately, but I wanted to<br />
get into doing something different or interactive or something with<br />
my website. I'd pick up one of those magazines and kind of have<br />
same kind of thing that Creative used to publish. Here is a code to<br />
do it in Pearl or HTML, whatever.<br />
<br />
I converted all of my website, quite a while ago, to XHTML from old<br />
HTML. I did not like any of the programs that generate web pages,<br />
mainly because...Well, today its probably OK, but I felt that<br />
earlier on, they were very inefficient. You'd have this much code<br />
for something and XHTML would write it in five lines.<br />
<br />
My old-fashioned [inaudible 01:32:23] said, "You know what, the<br />
interpreter or compiler or whatever, has to go through a lot of<br />
that just to pick out what is going to be displayed." My web pages<br />
are very compact and short. They are all XHTML, none of that is<br />
extra [inaudible 01:32:41] style pages and everything else.<br />
<br />
Anyway, so that's what I'll pick up a magazine for. I'm was doing a<br />
little bit of programming in Pearl and then I said, "No. You know<br />
what, I can get routines that I can download and I don't have to<br />
learn it myself. I learned enough to know that I don't want your<br />
Pearl program." [laughs] Or what is the other one? I don't know.<br />
I'm right at the point now where I'm wanting to do some more things<br />
that I can't, so I'll probably purchase some more computer<br />
magazines and learn about it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Has anyone talked to you about the purchase of PC by Davis?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is a big story.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: She was involved.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was involved. There was a magazine called PC. I was in San<br />
Francisco.<br />
<br />
Kevin: PC magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: PC Magazine, right. And, there was a guy named Tony Gold and there<br />
was somebody else that I can't remember. There was Tony Gold and<br />
this Mr. X started this magazine and they hired...David Banell will<br />
probably tell you all, I don't know all the details but I'm sure he<br />
has it engraved in his brain.<br />
They hired David Banell to run it and I guess several other people,<br />
and my understanding is, that they told them they were going to<br />
give them a piece of the action, they weren't going to pay them<br />
very much but you're all part owners and everything, but nobody<br />
ever wrote it down.<br />
<br />
So when Ziff Davis approached Tony Gold and Mr. X and wanted to buy<br />
the magazine, and the guys said, "Oh yeah, sure," and they sold it<br />
to him and all these people that were working for them said, "Well,<br />
what about us. We're part owners too." But there was no proof of<br />
it. So Ziff bought it, and they were right in the middle, just<br />
about to go to press with an issue and they got word that it had<br />
been purchased by Ziff.<br />
<br />
So David Banell took just about the entire staff and they walked<br />
out and went across town and started PC World. Apparently their<br />
lawyers said, "Don't take anything with you." So they just walked<br />
out and left the offices as they were, and Ziff, who now had a<br />
magazine to get out and no one to do it, sent me out to San<br />
Francisco for a couple of weeks and there was like an editorial<br />
assistant and a couple of freelance writers, were the only people<br />
left.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So this is when you became the interim.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is how I become the editorial director of PC. So I basically<br />
went out there and walked into this office and had to pull together<br />
their issue and get it off to the printer. They had a big dummy on<br />
the wall where everthing...<br />
<br />
Kevin: They lay all the...<br />
<br />
Betsy: They lay all the impositions where all the pages and the stories<br />
were going to go and they moved everything around. [laughs] But<br />
they couldn't resist.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That is awesome.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This one guy, whose name I wish I could remember. Barry Owen,<br />
worked with me, and we were able to get it off to the printer and<br />
then pack everything up and send it back to New York and then they<br />
hired Barry Owen, he moved to New York and he eventually become the<br />
editor, because that was who they had.<br />
I was sort of the editorial director for a while and they said<br />
that, "If you were going to do this, you would have to come to the<br />
city. We are going to really set up an office here and make it<br />
real." And I said, "No, I am not going to drive into the city every<br />
day or take the train or the bus or anything." It was a interesting<br />
story and we were getting much more interesting version of it from<br />
David Barnell, who was there. [laughs]<br />
<br />
And in the mean time, they were all starting up PC World and taking<br />
all of their freelancers and trying to make it as difficult as<br />
possible for PC. That was a big rivalry, obviously.<br />
<br />
David: And then it created a couple of months of problems at creative too,<br />
because my editor was gone. I had really gotten very dependent to<br />
rely on her for so many things. "I got to edit this myself." And<br />
then the whole question mark was, OK if PC magazine, is she can<br />
stay with it. It was a time of uncertainty.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm sure it was a bad career move.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. But PC magazine still exist.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, exactly. I don't know if I would have existed if I had to<br />
commute to New York, that's a nasty commute. Millions of people do<br />
it but, I just didn't want to be one of them. I didn't mean to<br />
interrupt, so back to you.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What are you most proud of, or everything you have done?<br />
<br />
David: OK, that's obviously not a one word answer. Proud is, I am not<br />
crazy about it. I guess the fact that I continued to hear from<br />
people that said, "Hey, I got my start in computing from Basic<br />
computer games or Creative Computing," or something that I had my<br />
hand in, that makes me feel pretty good.<br />
You have a long term, or longer term influence that just what you<br />
do at the time, it's living on. It's not living on forever. Basic<br />
isn't going to live on forever. But I think the idea that having<br />
some positive influence on other people, on their lives, on their<br />
careers, that's a good.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You helped send people into the computer science field.<br />
<br />
David: And you know the specific individual accomplishments. Yeah, I wrote<br />
a couple of programs that are probably in some cases, maybe not the<br />
program but the routines, are still in use. That's minor compared<br />
to having an influence on people and their career and their<br />
outlook, their future. That's way more important. "OK so I wrote a<br />
great algorithm, so what."<br />
<br />
Kevin: And you really think it's the same algorithm that's being used in<br />
Google maps and...<br />
<br />
David: Portions of it, yeah. But that is minor. I look back and I say,<br />
"Almost anything that I wrote in the last 30-40 years, if I were<br />
doing it today, I would have done it a little differently, but I<br />
didn't know then what I know now." So there's no one thing I could<br />
say, "Oh, that was a really great article, or great insight," or<br />
something. Anything can be improved upon.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sure. That's what disappoints me about computer magazines today is<br />
I don't think that it seems like children going to be able to go.<br />
It's not going to motivate anybody to do anything, other than use<br />
Word version 18 or whatever. There's no Basic programs to type<br />
anymore and it's not exciting.<br />
[cross talk]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Well, [inaudible 01:42:31] was mentioning that at breakfast,<br />
oh gosh that was just yesterday.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was yesterday [laughs] .<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] That kids today don't have any feeling about, or I should<br />
say knowledge about the real basics of bits. What is a bit?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: Nobody knows anymore. He wanted to find some little simple piece of<br />
hardware. Really, I guess he has, that every kid when they're in<br />
the 5th or 6th grade will be exposed to this so they'll have some<br />
concept of what bits are all about. Are you ever going to get that<br />
into schools today? No. So anyway, it's just kind of, hopefully<br />
there's been some long term influence.<br />
And what I'm doing now even, which is mainly developing bible<br />
studies for...well, I mostly have guys that have had a drug or<br />
alcohol addiction problem coming to this. They're in a rescue<br />
mission. I'm hoping that these studies can have a little bit of an<br />
influence on the direction of their lives. They're a positive<br />
influence on where they go from here. So it's kind of, people more<br />
than a specific thing or whatever.<br />
<br />
[pause]<br />
<br />
Those are terrible copies.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They are copies. These are from the scans. I was printing scans and<br />
I wasn't trying to make them pretty. Just for my reasons, it was<br />
quick and dirty. I could've bumped the contrast and stuff.<br />
<br />
David: There's Carl.<br />
[pause]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do have anything left, like how many subscribers you had over time?<br />
Is that data around anymore? How many newsstand copies you had? I<br />
assume that is a lot.<br />
<br />
David: OK, maximum, I think we mentioned that. We hit just about a half a<br />
million before Ziff killed it. Then, they gave people a choice of<br />
three magazines that they expected to continue to publish, PC,<br />
Apple's A+, or Mac User.<br />
I'm guessing that most people went with PC. One of the reasons<br />
actually was Ziff's rationale at that point was, PC World had<br />
really grown a lot and the circulation base of PC World and PC were<br />
very close. They were both about a half million. PC might have had<br />
a small lead.<br />
<br />
Then, by killing Creative Computing and rolling all of those<br />
subscribers, there was some overlap. Certainly, there were some<br />
subscribers that got both magazines. You probably had a quarter of<br />
a million additional subscribers into PC. All of the sudden, they<br />
go to advertise, "We've got three-quarters of a million and PC<br />
World only has half a million."<br />
<br />
That was when PC had a huge growth spurt. You know, they started<br />
publishing those telephone-book-thick issues.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I would think that it probably still holds the record for the<br />
largest magazine ever published, whenever the issue was that they<br />
published it, it was their biggest one. Certainly magazines aren't<br />
getting bigger now. They didn't continue to increase in size after<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: Then they started publishing it twice a month. The nudge that the<br />
subscriber base at Creative, gave to PC really, separated them<br />
completely from PC World. They had their reasons.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. This is a chart of the page count of Creative Computing over<br />
its life. It's not a question, I just made a chart. Every December<br />
there's a peak for the big December issue. Right at the end it<br />
just, all of the sudden, stopped.<br />
<br />
David: Well, that's when Ziff had decided to kill it, which was almost a<br />
year before. They basically let us publish for another eight or<br />
nine months after they had made the decision.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was a lot of back and forth. Are they going to kill it? Are<br />
they not going to kill it?<br />
<br />
David: They weren't promoting, no subscription promotion. They were saving<br />
their money. If you don't promote the subscriptions, you're not<br />
going to get them.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is page count.<br />
<br />
David: It was advertising.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:48:59]<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't actually subscriber base didn't drop them. That's cool.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just thought I'd do a comparison, even though that's not really<br />
what I'm doing here. In the beginning, you guys were bimonthly and<br />
they were monthly. I couldn't know how to do it accurately. Their<br />
page count's actually higher, because they were doing twice as<br />
much. I don't have all the data here. You guys tended to publish<br />
larger issues than "Kilobyte?"<br />
<br />
David: It was so dependent upon advertising. You got some magazines, they<br />
would run 80, 90 percent advertising, if they could. In some<br />
special interest fields, you can get away with that, because people<br />
are actually buying the magazine for the advertising, not for the<br />
editorial content.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [inaudible 01:50:02] , a good example.<br />
<br />
David: That's exactly right. Even what the guys that bought Military<br />
Vehicles, they just went over so heavily to...I always believe that<br />
you should have at least one-third editorial content, preferably<br />
more. They dropped down to 20 percent to edit.<br />
<br />
Kevin: There was one issue, the 10th anniversary issue, I don't mean to be<br />
picking on Wayne here. There was this quote he happened to say,<br />
which I thought was really interesting to me, I wanted to get your<br />
take on it. He said, this is in 1984, "A computer system doesn't<br />
really stand a prayer anymore unless there's at least one<br />
dedicated, independent magazine for its users."<br />
<br />
David: Wayne said that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wayne said that. Is that true? At the time, would you have agreed<br />
with that?<br />
<br />
David: In '84? Again, you've got to look at where we were in the cycle at<br />
that point. The cycle was then, there were more computers dying off<br />
than there were new ones being released. Standardization had come<br />
in really. You've got the IBM PC, and everybody's producing a PC<br />
clone. Apple kept going, and Atari, and Commodore attempted to.<br />
If you were to start a computer company at that point, with a new<br />
computer, yeah, you'd need something to give your user base<br />
something to do with it, more than just what the manufacturer was<br />
selling. So, that's probably accurate. What do you think?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, I think it's accurate. That's what people started to expect.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. Another chord of the same issue which we've kind of touched<br />
on from Tom Dwyer. This is in 1984. He's saying, "Computer<br />
magazines used to have personality [laughter] and now they don't."<br />
Now, they really don't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They really don't!<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think they still have personality in form but now it's just<br />
inconsistent.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Who was Tom Dwyer? I don't remember him.<br />
<br />
David: Tom Dwyer? He was at University of Pittsburgh. He came up with all<br />
those neat applications. He and Margo...He had the best basic<br />
primer of anybody, in fact the only one that both Kemeny and Kurtz<br />
endorsed outside of their own material. He had really written some<br />
good Basic books.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm just finishing up here. The Internet says you were born in<br />
1939. Is that right?<br />
<br />
David: Yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Where were you born?<br />
<br />
David: New York, New York.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent.<br />
<br />
David: I was born in the hospital that my father had a hand in designing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Really?<br />
<br />
David: He was an architect up until the Recession. I think he, perhaps,<br />
designed the restrooms but he wasn't the...<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: When were you two married?<br />
<br />
Betsy: 1988. 25 years ago.<br />
<br />
David: June 18, 1988.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What's your last name now?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mine?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ahl.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I tried keeping this professional thing and it was just way too<br />
confusing, since that really wasn't my name anyway. That was my<br />
first husband's name, and then just...this is way too complicated.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My wife kept her maiden name and now she wishes she hadn't. It's<br />
just confusing. It just made sense to do.<br />
<br />
Betsy: If had been my maiden name, I might have, but it really wasn't.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What haven't I asked you that I should have?<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] We kind of were noodling it around last night and said,<br />
"Man, the guy's thorough."<br />
<br />
Betsy: You the most prepared interviewer ever.<br />
<br />
David: I jotted down a couple of notes. Nope.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Got everything?<br />
<br />
David: What's your thinking? Because originally you were talking to me<br />
about covering Wayne's magazines and so on.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My original thought, when I had put no thought into it, was that it<br />
would be half about Wayne's magazine and half about Creative. First<br />
of all, after talking to him, I thought there's not enough to do<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: Did you talk to Wayne?<br />
<br />
Kevin: I talked to Wayne.<br />
<br />
David: Well that's good to know, right? Carl Helmers didn't know if Wayne<br />
was still alive.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He's still alive.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's true. We asked Carl Helmers if Wayne was still alive and he<br />
was [inaudible 01:56:06] .<br />
<br />
David: Actually, there was another guy up there that published a computer<br />
magazine. What the heck was the name of it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Who are you talking about?<br />
<br />
David: Up in New Hampshire, Peterborough. It was one of the earlier would-<br />
be competitors to Datamation. So, it was much earlier.<br />
He was absolutely totally convinced about the Kennedy assassination<br />
and published a computer analysis of all the photos and everything<br />
else. Every single issue of the magazine had this stuff. He and<br />
Wayne were on the same wavelength on that. You ask Wayne about the<br />
conspiracy. [laughs] You'll get an earful.<br />
<br />
Kevin: In answer to your question. First, it was going to be the two, and<br />
then that happened. Also my wife said, "If you're doing two, then<br />
it's going to seem like a compare and contrast thing." That's not<br />
what I want to do.<br />
Now I'm thinking that this will be a project about the earliest<br />
computer magazines, the first computer magazines. That way, I can,<br />
whatever, four or five chapters. One on Creative, and maybe Byte.<br />
I'm meeting with the editor of Byte in a couple of weeks at an<br />
event, maybe Interface Age or one of the other ones.<br />
<br />
David: If you can find Bob Jones, that would be an interesting contrast.<br />
He was Interface Age. He had a different perspective on a lot of<br />
things, and I had a lot of respect for him. He just didn't sell at<br />
the right time. Too bad. Bob Jones was a very serious, good guy.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Who were the other early people? Dr. Dobbs? I don't know what...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, Dr. Dobbs...<br />
<br />
David: Jim Warren! Oh my goodness. That would give you another perspective<br />
altogether.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's, again, the California...<br />
<br />
David: Jim Warren and Bob Albrecht are tied together very closely. They're<br />
both in sort of in the alternative lifestyle. I don't know what<br />
you'd call it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That probably had Friday afternoon pot parties. [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Oh, boy. Did they ever! Yes, yes. Jim also was the one that started<br />
the West Coast computer fairs. He's a very capable guy. Dr. Dobb's<br />
journal was in a sense, well, you've probably seen it. You have,<br />
right? OK, so you know.<br />
That's really low level programming rather than higher languages.<br />
We're talking about machine languages, assembly language,<br />
programming, and there. It was sort of like Microsystems was to<br />
Byte. Microsystems, for the really serious hardware guy. Dr. Dobbs<br />
was for the really serious programmer, compared to Creative which<br />
was for people who just wanted to type something in that would<br />
work.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:59:35] basic right. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Dr. Dobbs. That was a totally different [inaudible 01:59:43]<br />
competitor.<br />
<br />
David: We didn't compete at all. I had a view that we competed at all with<br />
them; they may have thought we did but I didn't think so.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did they even have advertising?<br />
<br />
David: Oh yeah, actually they did, and it kept going for a long time<br />
because it was a small little nitch magazine. But, yeah, Jim Warren<br />
would be an interesting guy, very interesting guy early on. I don't<br />
know about Albert because you say he published more tabloid<br />
newspapers. I don't know if they ever really published any magazine<br />
size thing or not. Probably not, but it would give me a totally<br />
different perspective because they are coming from the west coast,<br />
looser or whatever.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That sounded pretty loose.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah nothing compared to that.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think he was sort of in rebellion when he started working at<br />
Creator Computing because he was coming off of AT&T where he had to<br />
wear a suit to work every day. So the first thing he did was burn<br />
his suits and wear t-shirt and jeans way before anybody was doing<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: I went extremely in the other direction, yeah I did, but who else<br />
real early. Personal computing which I think David Barnell somehow<br />
involved in it at some point in there. Because they moved from the<br />
west coast to New Jersey, they were bought by...who was that? It<br />
was mostly a company that published things like hardware age and<br />
advertiser-driven magazines. What was the name?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, gosh. Begins with an 'H'.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Halshep<br />
<br />
David: No. Anyway, when they brought personal computing...I think Barnell<br />
maybe even started it, and then they moved it to New Jersey, and<br />
then David said "I'm not going to New Jersey. I'm a west coast<br />
guy," or whatever. And then, they changed the whole thing totally.<br />
That's why I said they're one of the ones where they were so<br />
totally advertiser driven. A press release is a product review, as<br />
far as they were concerned.<br />
They had some interesting stuff. They were a competitor only in<br />
name, but also because they got the advertising. "I think I'm going<br />
to advertise." "Oh! We're going to publish a wonderful review! Give<br />
it to us." And so they were early, and they made money. There were<br />
a bunch of flash-in-the-pan magazines that lasted 2 or 3 or maybe 6<br />
issues, but nobody...<br />
<br />
Kevin: But only one in seven made it, so...<br />
<br />
Betsy: One in seven, right?<br />
<br />
David: That's right, exactly. I can't remember the name of some of these<br />
ones, but there was a very successful big magazine that published<br />
all Apple...reviews of Apple stuff. What was that one? Apple by<br />
themselves spawned I'd guess half a dozen magazines.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Inquest, and Insider, and Apple...a bunch of others there.<br />
<br />
David: Right. Actually, there's one that I can't think of the name of, it<br />
turned out, it was bigger and thicker and creative. They were<br />
publishing a lot of stuff, but again, it would all be positive and<br />
so they really killed us on getting advertising. We had been a<br />
publisher of Apple material for a while. Then all these others came<br />
along. That one, whatever it was, was really took a lot of<br />
advertising from us. I'll think about it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You'll remember.<br />
<br />
David: I'll remember some of this. When it all settled out, you came back<br />
down to eight or nine, but the ones we're talking about...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Well, at one point there was 200.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I think that's correct.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You are probably counting newsletters..<br />
<br />
Kevin: Probably industry-specific stuff and niche stuff but still, you<br />
went from one to 200, 10 years ago.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. That's true.</div>Mauryhttps://www.computingpioneers.com/index.php?title=Dave_Ahl_and_Betsy_Ahl&diff=141Dave Ahl and Betsy Ahl2019-09-25T18:19:20Z<p>Maury: fix deck -> DEC</p>
<hr />
<div>This is a transcript of an audio interview. This transcript may contain errors - if you're using this material for research, etc. please verify with the original recorded interview.<br />
<br />
Source: ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast<br />
<br />
Source URL: http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-280-david-and-betsy-ahl-creative-computing-magazine<br />
<br />
Interviewer: Kevin Savetz<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm interested in how you guys got together. Was it some sort of<br />
office romance? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It started before then. I was working at Drew University and I was<br />
dating the computer science professor. He invited Dave...he was a<br />
subscriber to Creative Computing. I can remember being at his house<br />
and picking up a copy of this magazine and thinking, "Creative<br />
Computing," and laughing. "What kind of a title is that?"<br />
He invited Dave to come speak to one of his classes. While he was<br />
there, he said, "I should stop by your placement office. We're<br />
starting to expand. I'm looking for some people." Right? Am I<br />
getting this right? I was looking for other opportunities, so I<br />
sent him my resume. Many months later, he hired me.<br />
<br />
David: She still smarts about that.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: I interviewed her in, I don't know, April or so.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You interviewed me on April 17th and you did not hire me until<br />
August 1st. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: A lot was going on that year. That was '78.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was a really long time after that that we got married. We didn't<br />
get married until 10 years later.<br />
<br />
David: Actually, I had hired Betsy as our business manager. That's what I<br />
really needed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Not a wife, then.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not wife then, either.<br />
<br />
David: Not at that point. We had 2 buildings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had one.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, well I was looking for...<br />
<br />
Betsy: My first job was to find another building.<br />
<br />
David: We were expanding like crazy. In fact, one of the reasons that I<br />
didn't hire her sooner, I had just left my day job at AT&T, and was<br />
facing up to, "Oh my gosh, can I afford to take a salary out of<br />
Creative Computing?" Yes, we had expanded a lot, but can I even pay<br />
myself, much less other senior people? I left AT&T in July, and<br />
finally by August it became clear I really have to get this<br />
administration end of things under control.<br />
The editorial was OK. I had enough outside contributors that were<br />
going along with what we were doing in-house that I could continue<br />
with that, but it was the other end of things where we really had<br />
some problems. So then we go to 2 separate facilities. One was a 2<br />
family house on the other side of Morristown, and the other was a<br />
converted greenhouse garage, which is where I started. So, Betsy<br />
was in the greenhouse garage where I had the administration side of<br />
things, and I was at the house and that was the editorial and art<br />
and...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Software.<br />
<br />
David: ...putting the magazine together. Software, right. So she would<br />
come over from her place to my office every day or two just to let<br />
me know what's going on, and we'd get together. But it wasn't until<br />
I don't' remember the date when Betsy was saying, "Well, I'd like<br />
to get into..."<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well I had spent all my summers in college and two thereafter<br />
working at our local newspaper, writing editing and putting the<br />
whole thing together, so I think I more or less just said, "We've<br />
got all these new product announcements that we don't have anybody<br />
to do, why don't I just do them?" So, I started out doing the press<br />
releases and things.<br />
<br />
David: Her newspaper experience was first in high school covering sports.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, I started out covering the unpopular sports as a senior in<br />
high school. Because they didn't want a girl to write about the<br />
important sports. So they let the girl write about the unimportant<br />
sports, which turned out to be the winning sports, at this small<br />
New Jersey high school. That's how I started.<br />
<br />
David: And then at the newspaper, you started by writing obituaries,<br />
right?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well, it's one of the things I did. I always wanted to be a Spanish<br />
teacher. I didn't know anything about this. So, I got this sports-<br />
writing job by way of a babysitting job, I babysat for the<br />
publisher's kids and on the way home one night he said to me, "We<br />
always have a boy from the school who writes about the sports for<br />
the paper, do you know anybody?" and I said, "Well, I know the guy<br />
who did it last year, and if he could do it, I could do it."<br />
So I did that and didn't' think much more of it. Went off to<br />
college, came back over spring break, and ran into the guy in the<br />
grocery store and he said, "Would you like a job working for the<br />
paper this summer?" And I said sure. I had no idea whether he<br />
wanted me to sweep the floors or what, but it was a job so I took<br />
it. It was in the editorial department.<br />
<br />
And I learned from some very serious journalists who had worked for<br />
a very good paper, the Newark Evening News, which was a very<br />
serious paper that probably was too serious and folded, probably in<br />
the mid '60s, but these people were really good journalists and<br />
they taught me a lot.<br />
<br />
I think it was that first year, about halfway through the summer<br />
the publisher was on vacation, the editor was going to go on<br />
vacation when the publisher came back and the publisher, the day he<br />
was supposed to come back had appendicitis, had to have an<br />
appendectomy which back in those days was a much bigger deal than<br />
it is now. The editor said, "Well, I'm leaving." [laughs] And there<br />
I was. I was running this little paper.<br />
<br />
David: So I figured if you can run a newspaper, even though it's just a<br />
summer job, she could do a lot for us. Well, Betsy continued to<br />
handle the administrative things for really quite awhile and, as<br />
she said, probably was initially doing new product releases. Cause<br />
you get just tons of it over the transom and from these smaller<br />
companies...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So you'd like get a press release and then you'd rewrite it, that<br />
sort of things?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well we had a new product section and it was a format, a style for<br />
them, for each one. If they sent a photo, do a photo, a cut line<br />
for it. Basically what I do is let them pile up and then sort<br />
through and figure out which ones were worthy of attention. And<br />
then it was kind of just filler. They ran in one column and when<br />
you came to the end of the magazine whatever you had leftover you<br />
would fill in with these.<br />
<br />
David: And the thing is that the companies that were putting out these<br />
press releases, this was back in the, what '76, '77 or so, tiny<br />
little companies. They had no marketing expertise so they were<br />
sending us, in some cases, not quite handwritten but pretty crude.<br />
So it took some editing and some real work to make them readable.<br />
And then, as Betsy said, you had to guess. OK, which one, this is a<br />
significant product but is this guy going to be able to make this<br />
company go or is it just going to flop? And we tried to be<br />
responsible to the readers. Reporting on things that weren't just a<br />
wonderful great new idea but something that they were going to have<br />
on the market that was going to get some support and everything<br />
else. So anyway. That was a long story of how we got together.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I still don't know how you got together.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We were working in an office about as large as this banquette here<br />
together. Because when we first started working together we didn't<br />
have this other house. So it was the two of us. You had an actual<br />
desk I believe. I had a table that he had made out of particle<br />
board. Yeah it was fancy and I had to put duct tape along it<br />
because the edge was making holes in my clothes.<br />
So we worked in this office back to back, sort of got to know each<br />
other, and became friends, little by little. He said to me, when<br />
you're looking for this building, it would be a good thing if there<br />
was a place for me to live because I'm in the process of getting<br />
separated from my wife. Which it turned out you didn't do right<br />
away but eventually you did. Right?<br />
<br />
David: Well, it was three months later. That was right away in a sense.<br />
What precipitated that was we had a woman that was working in the<br />
mailroom and she got in cahoots with somebody in the accounting<br />
department and they started working a little embezzlement.<br />
<br />
Kevin: This was at the [inaudible 00:13:49] ?<br />
<br />
David: Pardon?<br />
<br />
Betsy: At Creative Computing.<br />
<br />
David: No, at Creative Computing. This was just after Betsy was hired. In<br />
fact, they had it going on before and I mean they were very good at<br />
it. What they did is they set up a bank account in the name of<br />
Creative Computing in the next county. And they would take very<br />
fourth or fifth check and it might be a subscription, it might be<br />
paying for an ad or something...<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was mostly the advertisers.<br />
<br />
David: Well it was both. And then they put that into their bank account.<br />
And then the one that was in the accounting department would mark<br />
the thing as paid.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, she didn't. That was her mistake.<br />
<br />
David: Well, she didn't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because that wasn't her job.<br />
<br />
David: Well she blew one. In any event it was my advertising manager that<br />
we had sent an overdue notice to one of the advertisers.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Apple.<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Apple. It was Regis McKenna, it was Apple's agency.<br />
<br />
David: And they said, we paid that. And a woman said, well send me proof.<br />
And they did. And we looked at the bank where it was deposited and<br />
then we called in local detective, police department. And they got<br />
the bank records and said, "How much do you think this was?" Well<br />
no they didn't say that, they said, this is probably a lot more<br />
than you thought.<br />
And it turned out to be well over $100,000. And our total annual,<br />
not even profit at that point...well, the gross was just about a<br />
million at that point, not quite, but close to it. So $100,000 was<br />
a big, big chunk 10 percent.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When was this?<br />
<br />
David: '78. And, so, obviously we fired these two. And then the court<br />
finally, they determined that they had also, one of them had been<br />
involved in welfare fraud and other stuff and the court ordered<br />
them to pay it back at the rate of, I don't know...<br />
<br />
Betsy: 47 cents a week.<br />
<br />
David: It was some tiny amount.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 00:16:26]<br />
[laughter and crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Course they'll never pay anything.<br />
<br />
David: And we got one payment you know, and that was it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And she was ordered to do public service. Like who wants someone<br />
doing public service for them who's done something like that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Magazines back then, probably any business but, they were a hotbed<br />
of intrigue. You had that happened and then the whole Bike Magazine<br />
getting stolen.<br />
<br />
David: So Betsy actually, in response to that brought, in response to the<br />
embezzlement brought in her Sister-in-Law Bobbi, and I think your<br />
mother too...<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Bobbi's mother.<br />
<br />
David: Bobbi's mother, OK. But one to...<br />
<br />
Betsy: My mother in law. I was a widow at the time.<br />
<br />
David: ...do some of the accounting because we didn't have an accountant<br />
and wanted just to help out and make some calls to advertisers and<br />
say can you speed up your payment a little bit and also calls to<br />
people that we owed money to, hey we're going to be maybe a little<br />
late. It really didn't look good. That was just a huge amount of<br />
money and so we had to stretch things out and hope that the growth<br />
continued so we could recover some of this.<br />
Betsy really rescued us there. It was amazing. We finally did<br />
stretch things out. What precipitated the separation with my wife<br />
at the time is I went home and told her this had happened and<br />
everything.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Thanksgiving weekend. Day before Thanksgiving.<br />
<br />
David: The day before Thanksgiving is when we got all the information from<br />
the police department and I went home to my wife and she said, "You<br />
dumb...," well I won't repeat the whole thing but, "You are so<br />
stupid. You trust people." "Yes, I trust people." "You shouldn't<br />
trust people like that. Get out of the house. I can't put up with<br />
this anymore." So it was a good thing we had a two family house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had this two family house.<br />
<br />
David: I moved into the bedroom on one side.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He had his office on one side of the top floor in the back bedroom<br />
and his bedroom in the back bedroom on the other side and his<br />
kitchen. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is this the place I was reading about where your bedroom was above<br />
the kitchen?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yes. The Ted Nelson.<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, a lot of things precipitated. Because of that, we had to<br />
make some other changes on personnel and move some people around. I<br />
think after that then Betsy took more of a role in the editorial<br />
end of things.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Stayed there until the bitter end.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The bitter end. Actually, I was there after he was gone.<br />
<br />
David: That's true.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ziff continued to pay me several months after they closed the<br />
magazine to stay behind and clean up because we have a 75,000<br />
square foot building. Make sure that we don't dispose of the<br />
hardware and just basically get it ready.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When you quit at the phone company to start a magazine, that must<br />
have been scary.<br />
<br />
David: I had left Digital Equipment in 1974, and I'm sure you read the<br />
whole rationale behind that, and joined AT&T in marketing,<br />
educational marketing. Same thing I was doing at DEC but obviously<br />
marketing different products to a different mix of customers. AT&T,<br />
back then and perhaps today, they had a real formula that you're in<br />
a job for two years and then they rotate you out or they put you in<br />
another job.<br />
The way AT&T works is they have certain steps. There's a manager<br />
and then a director level. There are levels, one, two, three, four,<br />
five. The operating companies, like Pacific Bell and so on, have<br />
similar steps that are considered a half step below AT&T. What they<br />
do is they rotate you out to an operating company, a half step<br />
promotion, they rotate you back into AT&T, now you're a full step.<br />
You never get a full step in one company.<br />
<br />
They had offered me a rotation to Southern Bell. Birmingham,<br />
Alabama. "No. No." Then probably two or three months later said<br />
we've got an opening in Wisconsin Tel. "Oh my gosh. Come on,<br />
something sensible." I turned them down, which was bad. You can't<br />
turn down. If you turn down three you might as well retire.<br />
<br />
The third one was, in a sense, it wasn't a promotion but it was a<br />
sideways job jump within AT&T itself. I went from having the<br />
education group, which was about eight people, to corporate<br />
communications, which is about 100 people and a huge budget. I was<br />
responsible for all of the marketing communications for the whole<br />
Bell system. Not advertising.<br />
<br />
We had seminar centers, put out all kinds of educational pamphlets,<br />
even a magazine for our customers on how to use the equipment. I<br />
was doing that. It's a big job. It's a 50 hour a week job. Creative<br />
Computing was halfway down the block. I'd go there at lunch time,<br />
see how things were doing.<br />
<br />
As I said a little bit ago, when it looked like we were going to<br />
hit a million dollars I said I've got to get serious about this.<br />
That's when I resigned from AT&T. That was probably the first, I<br />
shouldn't say the first, but that was a major problem with my wife<br />
at that time. You're leaving AT&T? You're leaving all those<br />
benefits? What are you doing, you idiot? We were on the downward<br />
spiral at that point and then the embezzlement just sealed the<br />
whole thing.<br />
<br />
Leaving any job for an unknown thing like you started a little<br />
company and you leave your day job. You're making a real<br />
commitment.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Even once you were at Creative full time, it looks like you did a<br />
lot of everything. You were writing, you were doing programming,<br />
you were being the editor, the publisher and the editor which is<br />
not done anymore.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. I don't know. You can correct me. I don't think I was a<br />
control freak.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. You had Phil Ellenberg. You had just hired Phil Ellenberg as<br />
the advertising manager. Richie was doing it. Where did he come<br />
from? He came from some respectable place. He came from some<br />
respectable place, Phil Ellenberg.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, he did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was like a real person who had a real job, not like the rest of<br />
us. He was the ad manager. I think once you made the step to leave<br />
AT&T then you mostly concentrated on the editorial. You weren't<br />
selling ads and writing and you had Steve North who was doing a lot<br />
of the editorial.<br />
<br />
David: At the beginning, yeah. The thing is I'd be lying if I said I knew<br />
how things were going to go, I knew this was going to be a huge<br />
magazine some day. I had no clue. When I started Creative Computing<br />
there weren't even personal computers at that point. I was<br />
convinced, I guess, that they would come about. I had no idea that<br />
it would be three months later that the Altair came about. It was<br />
more that I thought that an educational magazine like we had been<br />
publishing at DEC should continue.<br />
DEC had dropped off. They stopped publishing Edu when I left the<br />
education group. Well, they published an issue or two but they<br />
really weren't serious about continuing it. Then you had all of<br />
these people out here in the west coast, the Hewlett Packard<br />
computers. They were publishing some good software, they had some<br />
good arrangements with Minnesota Educational Computers Consortium<br />
and some others to distribute stuff that they developed, but there<br />
was no information source for schools and teachers and kids that<br />
were using computers.<br />
<br />
That's what I envisioned initially, but then once the Altair and<br />
the others came out people buy this kit computer and say what can I<br />
do with it? We've got these programs that will run.<br />
<br />
Betsy: First you have to steal Basic.<br />
<br />
David: What?<br />
<br />
Betsy: First you have to steal Basic.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I noticed that, I don't know what it's called, the public opinion<br />
or I don't know the word, this part here. The number one magazine<br />
of computer applications.<br />
<br />
David: That was a Davis thing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It started off first issue a non-profit magazine of educational and<br />
recreational. That was November 1970. May/June 1975 the words non-<br />
profit disappeared.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He never set it up as a non-profit.<br />
<br />
David: I did not.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You started making a profit.<br />
<br />
David: That's right. [laughs]<br />
Betsy; It was the unintentionally non-profit.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Three years later it quietly changed into the number one magazine<br />
of computer applications and software.<br />
<br />
David: That was when Ziff Davis took over.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Really? No, that was '78.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, that was '78.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, '78.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He stayed until the end.<br />
<br />
David: Right. OK. You're right. Who knows. We changed it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It seemed like a good idea at the time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's clearly a shift from education to education plus other things.<br />
<br />
David: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think it was when he realized that if you really wanted to make a<br />
profit you had to leave education behind because teachers want<br />
everything for free, or they certainly did then.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They have some websites for teachers. They still do. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Schools, teachers, yeah, they want everything for free and they get<br />
a lot for free. Places like Huntington Computer Project. There was<br />
one out here, Oregon. Yes, there was. I think it was based right<br />
here in Portland. It would have been, right, if it was in Oregon?<br />
Yes, there was a computing consortium at that time, Hewlett Packard<br />
oriented.<br />
Then you had People's Computer Company down in California that was<br />
sort of providing stuff to schools. They were mostly into<br />
alternative schools and there were a lot of them in the Bay area at<br />
that time. In fact, there was a magazine or a newspaper, big thing,<br />
I don't know how often it came out, called the "De-school Primer".<br />
<br />
It was for people that...I won't say they were hippies but<br />
basically homeschoolers but they got together and said, "We're<br />
going to educate our kids outside of the public education system<br />
but we don't want to do it individually. We'll get together." There<br />
was a big movement there and they were into computers, unlike the<br />
public schools back in '75, '76.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Homeschooling back then was very avant-garde. It was not approved.<br />
<br />
David: Not like today. The shift away from education. That, of course, was<br />
partially driven by the hardware that was then available to people<br />
at home.<br />
When I first started the magazine, I had four editors over the<br />
years, five I guess, but Steve Gray had been publishing a<br />
newsletter, what he called the "Amateur Computer Group Newsletter".<br />
It was for engineers who were scavenging up old parts from<br />
Honeywell and IBM and GE and DEC and trying to put together a<br />
computer. You've got success stories and here's how you can make<br />
this worth together.<br />
<br />
That was a long way away from an Altair, but that's what I was<br />
focusing on, people that were doing that and education. Changed our<br />
focus. You're right. Good observation.<br />
<br />
Kevin: After that, do you feel the focus changed in the next 10 years?<br />
<br />
David: The focus changed largely due to selling the magazine to Ziff<br />
Davis.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When's that?<br />
<br />
David: We were negotiating for a while and I think the sale finally went<br />
through in '83. Yeah, '83. Maybe late '82 but roughly then. They<br />
felt that you need more of a business focus, small business and<br />
people running businesses out of their home. That's where it<br />
started but then we got into real small businesses. I shouldn't say<br />
real but a store front or a small manufacturer, something like<br />
that. That's probably a direction we would not have gone. I<br />
wouldn't have gone on my own.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had a magazine called "Small Business Computing." Remember?<br />
<br />
David: That's right, we did. I would have kept Creative more targeted on<br />
the home market and still education, to some extent, but more on<br />
the home and people that were running a business, a single<br />
entrepreneur. You could review a spreadsheet or a small business<br />
computer or higher end printer or something but not lift it up to<br />
that next level up.<br />
When you're owned by somebody else and they say this is what we<br />
want to do you've got to be responsive to it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Why did you sell? Was it something that had to be done? I've read<br />
the official line.<br />
<br />
David: I think the official line is pretty close to the real line. What<br />
happened is the first magazine, maybe not the very first but the<br />
first sizable magazine, to sell was the Byte and they sold to<br />
McGraw Hill. Then there were three or four other sales. At the time<br />
there were maybe eight special interest publishers in the country.<br />
You had Hurst and CBS magazine and Ziff Davis. Maybe eight serious<br />
ones. There were some others that were, "Oh, it'd be nice if we<br />
could get into it."<br />
What happened is all of us at that point were spending maybe<br />
$100,000, $150,000 on circulation promotion. McGraw Hill says we<br />
want to get out there, we're going to spend a million dollars.<br />
They're mailing 10 times as much as we are. They're going to trade<br />
shows with big, elaborate booths and handing out all kinds of...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Free magazines.<br />
<br />
David: Not only free magazines but other stuff. That was half of it. The<br />
other half, which was probably more than half, was the advertising<br />
sales. We were using reps. We had different reps in different parts<br />
of the country, paying the rep commission on the advertising. When<br />
you are a McGraw Hill or a Hurst or a Ziff Davis you've got an in-<br />
house staff. They would have a reception at one of the computer<br />
conferences, a big deal.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We used to have a hospitality suite at the hotels in some of these<br />
conferences and then we would bring little hunks of cheese that we<br />
cut up from home and sneak the bottles of wine up the back stairway<br />
and they were having these big things with the giant balls of<br />
shrimp.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. It was just an order of magnitude different than what we<br />
could do. What happened, really, was that it got to the point where<br />
there were only three, really two, serious bidders that were still<br />
looking for a magazine and there are still about four magazines,<br />
four decent quality magazines, on the market and one was Compute,<br />
one was Interface Age. Personal Computing had just sold, there was<br />
us, and I forget who the fourth one was. There was four.<br />
<br />
Kevin: There were more magazines than buyers at this point.<br />
<br />
David: That's right. There were a lot more magazines, too, but there were<br />
four major players. One of the buyers, I didn't really regard them<br />
as serious, and that was Atari. I think they wanted to back into<br />
the thing. The two buyers left were CBS, and they had a magazine<br />
division at that time, and Ziff Davis and that was it. I said,<br />
"Man, I've got to make a deal here." That's what happened.<br />
I look back with hindsight. I said the guy, Robert I forget his<br />
last name, that owned Compute magazine, he held out. He held out<br />
until the end and he said, "I'm better than Interface Age," and he<br />
was and whatever the other one was, Family Computing, "I'm better<br />
than them." He got a really nice payoff from CBS because it was the<br />
last one and they wanted him. I don't know. If I had held off a<br />
little more would I have gotten more? Probably.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How much did you get?<br />
<br />
David: Can we publish this figure?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't know. I don't think we ever have.<br />
<br />
David: No, we never have.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's my chance for a scoop.<br />
<br />
David: Pardon?<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's my chance for a scoop.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] I'd rather not say. I can tell you Compute, if you ever<br />
read that number, which you will, it was seven times that much. It<br />
was huge. Huge. At that point, I think CBS just said we've got to<br />
get into this. We've really got to do something. The big loser was<br />
Bob Jones at Interface Age. He had a good magazine. That was a<br />
good, solid magazine. Bob Jones, he went to shows, he was always in<br />
a suit and tie. He would have fit into the corporate environment<br />
very well but he held out too long. I think he was holding out for<br />
even more.<br />
That's what I was afraid of. Less than a year later he was out of<br />
business. There was no way you could compete with these big guys.<br />
Ziff instantly started having these receptions at PC expos.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They had ad reps all over the country.<br />
<br />
David: Ad reps, yeah. Oh my gosh. We would not have survived.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Again, you [inaudible 00:41:03] .<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Not exactly right but yes. Wasn't bad. Wasn't bad.<br />
<br />
Kevin: But Ziff didn't have it for very long before they let it go. It was<br />
only a couple of years.<br />
<br />
David: It was almost four years. Three and a half years. They did a study,<br />
and this is one of the classics. I've been making a presentation at<br />
Leslie Park last year on the 10 biggest blunders in personal<br />
computing, and actually it's up to 12 now. One was, and I still<br />
feel that it was huge, is that Ziff Davis analyzed that market in<br />
'85 and determined that the home market, the market for home<br />
computers, had reached saturation. Five percent of the homes have a<br />
computer. That's it.<br />
There were three things, three major conclusions from their survey.<br />
I think probably one and a half of them were pretty good and one<br />
and a half were just absolutely wrong. The home market reaching<br />
saturation, wrong. The second one was that they said that the<br />
magazines that would be successful would be those that were focused<br />
on specific brands of computers. Are you getting all that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: With the IBM PC it really brought standardization to the industry.<br />
Their analysis was that Apple and PC were going to be the dominant<br />
players in the future and in that they were right. They said we've<br />
got to have a magazine that's just focused on those two and they<br />
did. What was their Apple magazine? They had two Apple magazines.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A+.<br />
<br />
David: But they also had the one for the Mac.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mac User.<br />
<br />
David: They had two Apple magazines and then PC. PC they spun off a whole<br />
bunch. PC Week.<br />
<br />
Betsy: PC Junior.<br />
<br />
David: A bunch of them. In any event, they were right in that. The other<br />
one that they were semi-right, in the long term future they were<br />
totally wrong but in the short term future they were probably<br />
right, and that they looked at...We had been covering bulletin<br />
board systems. CompuServe, whatever its predecessor was, basically<br />
online type of stuff.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Genie.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. They said that's just a flash in a pan, online stuff. Well, in<br />
'85 it was. It took a while. It took another 8 to 10 years for that<br />
but then oh my God. You know what's happened today. If they had<br />
stuck with Creative Computing and rather than trying to make it a<br />
small business focused magazine but kept the home and the online<br />
focus we would have owned the Internet market today, absolutely<br />
owned it. It would have been a bigger magazine than all the others<br />
put together. Hindsight is 20/20.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I know it wasn't your choice but do you have regret about that?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: At the time it was devastating.<br />
<br />
David: Absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was like someone killing your child.<br />
<br />
David: At the time, we sat in these meetings up in Stanford, Connecticut,<br />
of all places. The reason for that is Bill Ziff. What happened in<br />
the interim a year or two after they purchased Creative Computing<br />
and PC, Bill Ziff came down with cancer really big time and was<br />
afraid of dying next year. So he was moving all of his resources<br />
and the holdings outside of New York to avoid really major<br />
taxation. I'm not sure that Connecticut was much better but he was<br />
splitting them between Connecticut and Florida. Anyway, we wound up<br />
having a bunch of meetings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was trying to maintain residence in Connecticut.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I guess that was it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was living in the Crown Plaza.<br />
<br />
David: I remember the last one. We were up at the hotel.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Crown Plaza. It was Stanford, it wasn't Harvard.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, Stanford.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I said Harvard.<br />
<br />
David: When they finally came and said we're going to shut this down. That<br />
was a devastating time. We probably could have continued to work<br />
for Ziff if we had been willing to go into New York but when you<br />
get used to working a mile or two from where you live the idea of<br />
commuting into New York, who knows what the job would have been.<br />
Bye. That was it. That was, in retrospect, a mistake.<br />
The other thing that happened as a result of Bill Ziff having this<br />
bout with cancer is that Ziff Davis sold off all of their other<br />
special interest magazines. Popular Boating, Popular Photography.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yachting, Modern Bride.<br />
<br />
David: They had a big group of travel magazines. Actually, one of the<br />
things they did after Creative Computing was to shut down...we got<br />
friendly with the publisher and some of the people in the traveling<br />
division and we started doing some freelance travel writing.<br />
I was writing a monthly column for one of the travel magazines that<br />
went to travel agents on automating your travel office and so on,<br />
which was an interesting thing because there's a small business<br />
that really depended upon computers with the reservation systems<br />
and all the airlines had a different reservation system. You had to<br />
have Saber.<br />
<br />
A lot of them would go with one and make an agreement with somebody<br />
else to make their other reservations. In any event, it was a bad<br />
system and I was writing a column on how to make this work for you.<br />
As you know, I don't know how many months later we got into the<br />
Atari camp.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was your next gig?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. It was Joe Sugarman, remember, that hooked us up with Atari.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I thought it was Neil Harris.<br />
<br />
David: He was the one we worked with but it was Sugarman.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because he came from Commodore. I didn't know it was Joe Sugarman.<br />
<br />
David: He ran a company called JS&A for Joe Sugarman and Associates. They<br />
were the first one that took these full page ads in lots of<br />
different magazines and the quarter page...<br />
<br />
Betsy: The first advertorials.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, advertorial. The first print advertorials. Really serious<br />
stuff. Out of that, he spawned at least a dozen other companies.<br />
Sharper Image is a Sugarman and it's a spinoff. They've got a whole<br />
page just focused on this air ionizer or some crazy product, but he<br />
sold tons of that stuff. Then he started offering courses. He was<br />
on the verge of doing some big deal with Atari and so he knew all<br />
the people out there.<br />
I had taken his course and started running the ad. In fact, there's<br />
probably one in one of those issues that is basically a Sugarman<br />
ad. And so anyway, you took the course, too. So we got to know him.<br />
He got to know us, and we kept up. And, oh, OK. Creative Computing<br />
has folded, and I'm trying to get something going with Atari and<br />
getting their magazine really serious. And so he was the one that<br />
hooked us up with them. By the way, I'm surprised that you don't<br />
have Atari Explorer on your website<br />
<br />
Kevin: On the website? Well, the deal with my Atari magazines website is<br />
I've always strove to get permission. Atari can't be owned by the<br />
same company for more than three months at time.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's hard to get permission that way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You can't get permission. But it's out there, elsewhere. There are<br />
other archivists who don't bother to get permission. That's another<br />
good way to do things. Yeah, it's out there. I think Archive.org<br />
has it.<br />
<br />
David: Really? Yeah, because I hadn't seen it. I was looking for<br />
something...I still get inquires every once in a while from<br />
somebody that wants something in one of the previous magazines that<br />
we've published.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That's why I don't' risk it. There's a few magazine that I just<br />
absolutely would not, because it's owned by some giant monolith<br />
corporation now, and they need to hold on everything even if it's<br />
30 years old.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because someday they might be able to make money from it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right. That's why that's not there.<br />
Talk to me about...You did some weird stuff. The weird stuff I'm<br />
thinking of is the board game.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: "Computer Rage."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We just saw that. We might not have even remembered what it was it,<br />
but we saw it last night at the museum.<br />
<br />
David: They have one in the Collection's area of the Computer Museum. They<br />
didn't even know that we published it. I thought, "Look at this."<br />
<br />
Kevin: You did Computer Rage, which was weird; I want to ask you about<br />
that. You did the record album.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The record album made way more sense than the game.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, well it was a guy named Allan. He was a colonel at that time<br />
and he came to see me with the idea for the computer game.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I forgot about that.<br />
<br />
David: He was a colonel in the Army and had something to do with<br />
educational programs. The Army said people should know more about<br />
how computers work and everything else. He said, "The games that<br />
are on the market are pretty tacky and not fun. I've devised<br />
something." We worked together with him. We finally decided, "All<br />
right. We'll publish this game. By the way, he's a general and<br />
finally retired.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But he's not financing his retirement with [inaudible 00:54:29] .<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: No, not at all.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Will anyone buy this?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We did overprint.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't a big seller or big success, but we sold enough of them.<br />
Now the record was a little different. There was a guy named Dick<br />
Moberg who, at the time, was the president of the Philadelphia Area<br />
Computer Society. The first two personal computer festivals were<br />
actually in New Jersey, not the west coast. The West Coast Computer<br />
Faire came later with Jim Warren and that group. John Dilks started<br />
this computer festival in Atlantic City. This was before Atlantic<br />
City was a big casino place, but...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well, it was a casino place, but...<br />
<br />
David: ...but it was pretty tacky.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It still is.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Not like now.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not like now where it's so classy.<br />
<br />
David: In any event, they were having some issues with the hotel and the<br />
convention center in Atlantic City. Dick Moberg said, "We people in<br />
Philadelphia can do a better job than you guys in New Jersey." And<br />
he got together with what was his name? Lenny? And<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh! Saul Levis.<br />
<br />
David: Saul Levis, who was the president of the New Jersey amateur<br />
computer group. The two of them got together and said yeah, it'll<br />
be more convenient if we do a thing in Philadelphia. And Saul<br />
Levis, he had put together the first Trenton computer festival. It<br />
wasn't a big huge thing; it's gotten to be gigantic. In any event<br />
they said OK, we'll do this. At that point, this was '78; the Apple<br />
had just come out and people were making little plug-in<br />
peripherals.<br />
There was a company that...I'm not going to be able to remember who<br />
it was. They made a nice little plug-in board for the Apple. What<br />
they had was a very nice thing on the screen where you could<br />
position notes and then have them played back. So it was a visual<br />
programming of music.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Music Construction Center?<br />
<br />
Betsy: There were ads for it in magazines.<br />
<br />
David: No, it was a guy out of Denver. I don't remember. Anyway, before<br />
that everything had appeared line by line. But there were some<br />
reasonable playback systems that were starting to come on the<br />
market for the S-100 bus. There were about four of them. The<br />
programming was a little bit harrier, but nonetheless they sounded<br />
OK. And then there was still the leftovers in a sense that people<br />
that were doing work on mainframes to process music.<br />
So Dick Moberg said, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could get a number<br />
of these together?" And of course there's the Philadelphia<br />
Orchestra, we'll make it a Philadelphia Computer Music Festival! So<br />
it was largely his idea, but then, how do you publicize it? Well,<br />
you've got this magazine that's in your backyard, that was willing<br />
to recruit some people and publicize it. So we got about...I don't<br />
know at the festival there were probably 25 or 30 people that had<br />
stuff.<br />
<br />
They recorded it all, which in retrospect was a bit of a mistake<br />
because they had problems with one of the two channels in the<br />
stereo. They had the big reel-to-reel tape recorder, one of the<br />
channels was seriously too low. And then they said, "Well, we've<br />
got this wonderful tape; what are we going to do with it?" And I<br />
said, "Well, I'll do something with it."<br />
<br />
I hooked up with a studio in the city that made records, and we<br />
went in there and corrected the low channel a little bit, not<br />
totally, but enough that it sounded like stereo. And put together a<br />
vinyl record!<br />
<br />
I edited out a lot of the poor quality performances, made the<br />
record, and that sold! It sold pretty well. Our biggest problem was<br />
shipping. How do you ship a 12-inch vinyl record without it<br />
breaking? But that sold pretty well. That, of course, died off<br />
along with everything else when Creative Computing got killed by<br />
Ziff. But, I still had the original test pressing of that, the<br />
original, original.<br />
<br />
I played it back, and it sounded very good. Put it into, I forget<br />
what the software was, but, it was one, the digital routine. It<br />
would have been nice if I still had the original tape, but, I<br />
didn't. But, OK, it's got a little bit of deterioration, going to a<br />
record.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, we're not talking about losing overtones of a<br />
violin up at 15,000 hertz. It was within a narrow band, to begin<br />
with, in any event. But that did let me totally correct the left<br />
channel and bring it up to what it should be. I put that out. I'm<br />
selling CDs now, of that.<br />
<br />
In fact, a guy from Australia ordered one, and obviously, the<br />
postage to send anything overseas is a lot more. He said, "Why<br />
don't you just make MP3 files out of it?" Because, they're WAV<br />
files, the way they are now. I go, "OK."<br />
<br />
This is very recent, like within the last couple of weeks, I<br />
downloaded some software, "Convert WAV to MP3," converted it, sent<br />
them the files. They said, "That's great." What I think what I'll<br />
probably do is try to figure out how I can make them available from<br />
a website.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You've apparently forgotten that, like, 10 years ago, I did that.<br />
They're there.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. I know.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They're at vintagecomputermusic.com.<br />
<br />
David: Are they MP3s?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Well, then, I don't have to do it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You dummy.<br />
<br />
David: Bam. I did remember. I didn't know that you did them all. I thought<br />
you did a sample.<br />
<br />
Kevin: No. They're all there. I can see you're getting reflux.<br />
<br />
David: Boom. I wasted a little time. I waste a lot of time, these days.<br />
That was a cool thing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just think it was neat that you guys were willing to take chances<br />
with weird stuff.<br />
<br />
David: Where we took chances with really weird stuff was in the software.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Software publishing?<br />
<br />
David: We had a brand called, Sensational Software. Unfortunately, Ziff<br />
decided it was competing with some potential advertisers, which it<br />
was, in a sense. They killed it off. But, we had some really good<br />
stuff. We had the Apple game, what the heck was it? It was ported<br />
directly over from the arcade games.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Was it, "Space Invaders"?<br />
<br />
David: "Space Invaders."<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was a clone of, "Space Invaders"?<br />
<br />
David: It was the real.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You got it from, Jeff Lee's guy.<br />
<br />
David: Because, "Space Invaders," the Japanese game, was one of the first<br />
full-sized console video games where they used a general-purpose<br />
chip. "Space Invaders," was programmed for the 6502, Apple.<br />
We bought it from this Japanese company, and we had the only real<br />
"Space Invaders" game. That was one, and a couple of others that we<br />
really could have gone places with. That was just about the time<br />
that Ziff came in and said, "Nah, you can't have this anymore."<br />
<br />
They were into printed media, so, they kept the books going, but,<br />
not any of the other stuff. The other thing we had, was, speaking<br />
of computer music, a little division, that probably could have<br />
gotten a lot bigger, called Peripherals Plus. We were marketing a<br />
little computer music board, it was an S-100 bus once. But if we<br />
had then...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Didn't we have a plotter, too?<br />
<br />
David: Yep. We had about five or six interesting, low-level products. But,<br />
again, Ziff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That stuff was really competing with the advertisers.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Obviously, that wasn't our intent. But, yes it was. We also<br />
offered courses at that time. Do you remember, at County College?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't.<br />
<br />
David: That was just at when we moved into the new building at Hanover. We<br />
had two people that were doing that.<br />
<br />
Betsy: One of them was that crazy, Larry guy. He was seriously weird.<br />
<br />
David: County College of Morris, we reached an agreement that we would<br />
teach their Introductory Computer course. Not for their day<br />
students, but they offered evening courses, adult education, we<br />
were doing that. Fingers in a lot of pies, at that point.<br />
Actually, from that standpoint, it was, probably, good that Ziff<br />
got us a little bit more focused, and back to the roots of<br />
publishing. Getting spread a little thin.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You went to Atari, got the Atari game, and you did the "Atari<br />
Explorer," right?<br />
<br />
David: "Atari Explorer." They had had an occasional publication, not<br />
really a magazine, but one that was focused on the games, and they<br />
decided that they could start that one up again. It started up with<br />
a new name. We called it, "Atarian." It was focused, basically, on<br />
video games. You buy one of their video games and you get an issue.<br />
Anyway, there were different ways that they were going to promote<br />
it.<br />
But, a year later Nintendo just, absolutely, buried "Atarian," in<br />
'89. They kept Atari Spore going for, I think, two more issues,<br />
right?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Was it two?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember the details.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't much.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I remember why they killed it.<br />
<br />
David: Ms. Feisty here. Come on. You've got to tell the story here.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They were playing games with our printer. Production schedule.<br />
Everybody had a production schedule. We never missed our production<br />
date, getting things to the printer, getting them mailed. We just<br />
did it because that's what you had to do. I will probably get sued<br />
for this. Atari started not paying the printer and the printer says<br />
we're not going to print this until we get paid. The date kept<br />
slipping and slipping and the subscribers would be calling up and<br />
saying, "Where's my magazine?"<br />
This went on. It was bi-monthly. It went on for maybe six months. I<br />
finally wrote an editorial in which I explained to the readers<br />
exactly what was going on. They didn't see it until it was printed.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
David: That didn't get into the magazine, though.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It did.<br />
<br />
David: That's right, it did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They never saw it. We were producing it out of [inaudible 01:10:07]<br />
New Jersey and printing it in eastern Pennsylvania and they never<br />
saw it until it was too late. My tenure was cut short but I didn't<br />
really care at that point. I was sick of them. It was really hard.<br />
They're not easy people to deal with, even when the owners last for<br />
more than three months. That was my suicide by editorial. The only<br />
time in my life I've ever been fired.<br />
<br />
David: I didn't realize they didn't read that beforehand but I should<br />
have. I should have.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] I probably wouldn't have gotten fired if they had.<br />
<br />
David: That was the straw that broke the camera's back.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But then John [inaudible 01:11:05] kept doing it a little bit.<br />
<br />
David: I know. In a lot of cases, particularly with the games magazine,<br />
they wanted to approve everything that went in it. If you do an<br />
objective product review, you call it like it is. Oh m gosh, there<br />
was one, it wasn't just one product but a roundup after Consumer<br />
Electronics' show, and I don't remember what it was. Atari had<br />
brought out some new products that really weren't ready to go.<br />
In some cases I just said, "I'm not going to say anything about<br />
this one or these two or three. I'll focus on the ones that are<br />
ready to go or are in good shape." Oh my gosh. "What about this?<br />
This is a wonderful thing." "Well, maybe it will be but it isn't<br />
yet." We had issues all along on censorship and them changing what<br />
we had written and everything. As Betsy said, they were not nice<br />
people to work with. I forget, the two brothers.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Trammell.<br />
<br />
David: Trammell, yeah. That came from Commodore.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Jack and somebody else. Jack and his brother.<br />
<br />
David: It was interesting because yesterday I saw Nolan Bushnell. He was<br />
at that event. Nolan was flamboyant, but basically he had integrity<br />
and he was an honest guy. Man, oh man. Didn't stay and the<br />
corporation changed after he left.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Then you're done with Atari and then it's straight to military<br />
vehicles there?<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] No.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was a hiatus.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, man. We published magazines, in-house magazines, for a couple<br />
other organizations. Did one for Nabisco called...I don't even<br />
remember but it was for their marketing department. Published that<br />
for some period of time and then they decided to bring it in-house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was more like a newsletter.<br />
<br />
David: It was 16 pages. It was getting there.<br />
<br />
Betsy: 16 pages is a newsletter.<br />
<br />
David: All right. Magazine format. Let's put it that way. We did some<br />
fulfillment. Basically, a lot of freelance writing on the travel<br />
field.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Stuffed dogs. The stuffed dogs. Remember those four dogs for my<br />
brother?<br />
<br />
David: That's fulfillment. Fulfillment for Con Edison. I published a<br />
couple newsletters for a while, one called "Effective Investing"<br />
and one called "Effective Communication" for writers. We're talking<br />
early '90s.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was when people still cared, thought that there might be a<br />
correct way to do something and they wanted to know what it was.<br />
<br />
David: That was focused on "Take this computer and start to use it as a<br />
tool. Don't be afraid of the thing." '91/'92 not everybody was<br />
using a computer yet or a personal computer. That was the<br />
orientation of that. Then the other thing we got into big time was<br />
we'd been involved with a local rescue mission for men with drug,<br />
alcohol, homeless issues and we were writing and producing their<br />
newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We were producing all of their fundraising material.<br />
<br />
David: We started, I think, with the newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, we did everything. Appeal letters and newsletters and<br />
maintaining their database, the donor database. It took a lot of<br />
time.<br />
<br />
David: We did that for five years. Then '96 I got an opportunity to buy<br />
this crazy military vehicles magazine for people that were<br />
restoring old historic military vehicles. It was a magazine but it<br />
was I guess more of a glorified newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was horrible.<br />
<br />
David: It was horrible but it was really terrible. In fact, the editor or<br />
the publisher, whatever, the owner, he'd take the articles however<br />
the writer would send them. If it was double spaced type, boom,<br />
that's what would appear in the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Save all the typesetting.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He had zero typesetting expense.<br />
<br />
David: Zero editing. He just took anything that came in, put it in. Ads<br />
the same way. Half the ads were hand written. Well, not half, but a<br />
significant number had corrections on them by hand. Oh my gosh. It<br />
was so terrible. I made it into a real magazine and built it up. At<br />
that point the circulation had been about 10,000. We built it up<br />
and we were pushing close to 20,000 magazines. It was a real<br />
magazine. I sold it to Crowsey publications.<br />
Then they, which I did not realize at the time, the owner, Chet<br />
Crowsey, had put the whole company up for sale and he sold the<br />
company a year or two later to some other specialty magazine<br />
publisher. We're talking narrow, narrow niche. They published a lot<br />
of, what'd they call it, white tail bow hunting. Really, really<br />
narrow stuff. Up in northern Wisconsin is where they were based. In<br />
any event, he sold it.<br />
<br />
The new publishers, their whole stick was making money. They<br />
immediately raised the subscription price of military vehicles. We<br />
were charging $18 a year which was fine and they raised it to<br />
$21.95 or something and they raised the advertising rates and<br />
everything else.<br />
<br />
The last I knew, the circulation was back down around 10,000.<br />
[laughs] It doesn't pay off to take that approach. I didn't have<br />
the same emotional connection, with that as I did with Creative<br />
Computing and the other magazines there. Fine, you do what you want<br />
with the magazine, it's OK.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You didn't care too much?<br />
<br />
David: Nah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What do you guys do now? It seems like charity work and [inaudible<br />
01:19:45] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. I run a non-profit called Beyond the Walls and he runs his<br />
website and does Bible studies.<br />
<br />
David: Right. Actually, Betsy, the organization she has, she's executive<br />
director of Beyond the Wall, that's gotten huge.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's getting bigger and bigger.<br />
<br />
David: It's gotten huge.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think huge is probably an exaggeration.<br />
<br />
David: Well, not huge like a Gates Foundation thing.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I wish. We started in 2005 with 26 volunteers going to Guatemala to<br />
work with this organization that works with the people who scavenge<br />
in the Guatemala City garbage dump. The dump is in a ravine. It<br />
started in the early '50s and as it has filled up around the edges<br />
they put a couple layers of sand on it and let it sit for a bit and<br />
then the people build houses on it out of scraps and things that<br />
they made.<br />
This organization called Potter's House that we work with has been<br />
working with them for 26 years. They have an education program,<br />
micro-enterprise and health and various things that they do. Since<br />
2005 we've been sending volunteer teams. We're not the only ones<br />
sending volunteer teams down there to build houses and do<br />
healthcare and do stuff with the kids. So we started with 26 and by<br />
the end of the year we'll be well over 150 volunteers. We'll have<br />
three weeks this summer, I'll have 135 over three weeks this<br />
summer.<br />
<br />
It started in our backyard and one of the reasons that we wanted<br />
to...It started in the church and we started the organization<br />
partially because it's easier to raise money if you're not a church<br />
and it's also easier to make the volunteer opportunities available<br />
to people. If you say "Oh I'm going to Guatemala." "Oh I'd love to<br />
go with you! Who's going?" "It's my church." "Oh."<br />
<br />
But, if it's this local non-profit it's more appealing and we've<br />
really succeeded in doing that because we have people not only from<br />
in our own community, but this year we're going to have a family<br />
from Oklahoma, about six families from Texas, several people from<br />
Florida.<br />
<br />
David: You got the Virginia.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Virginia. It's like oh my goodness. How is this happening?<br />
<br />
Kevin: And everyone goes out to Guatemala and does the [inaudible<br />
01:22:31] ?<br />
[cross talk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. We all meet in Guatemala. I have three teams. One each week,<br />
and I'll be there the whole time and they'll come down and probably<br />
each team will build two or three houses. They'll do medical<br />
clinic, they'll do day camp for kids, soccer or baseball, sports<br />
things.<br />
They were about teenagers, so they love to do the...Everybody does<br />
construction in the morning. Then, in the afternoon teenage girls<br />
and some of the boys who want to do other stuff will help out with<br />
these other kid-related activities. That's what I'm doing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My wife is in Africa this week and last doing something similar.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Cool.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Which is why I have to leave shortly to go get my kids.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: What part of Africa is she in?<br />
<br />
Kevin: She did some stuff for Special Olympics. Then, they were helping<br />
build something at a food bank. I don't know that much yet, because<br />
she's not home yet.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Cool.<br />
<br />
David: That's terrific. She'll be changed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: She keeps telling that she wished I could've come, and I do, too.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You have this kid. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: We've got the two kids. The six-year-old doesn't feed herself real<br />
well.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: She can't drive to school.<br />
<br />
David: Your annual budget has gone from 0 to what? Are you going to hit<br />
about 150, 200,000 this year?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's over 300 already.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, OK. [laughs] 300.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's small potatoes compared to...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: As my boss, the Chairman of the Board, and I'm the only employee,<br />
is fond of saying, "The people out there don't realize that we're<br />
just a bunch of schlumps sitting around a table making this stuff<br />
up as we go along. Very good leadership. He's a very good leader.<br />
<br />
David: We were trying to maybe see if we can touch base with the Gates<br />
Foundation when we were up there. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: We got a brochure into his hands.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we got a brochure into his hands and some other stuff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was Bill Gates there?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah. I had a picture of him that I had taken at the first<br />
Altair convention in 1976, before he had actually made the deal<br />
with Altair to develop BASIC. He had said, "I can do it," but they<br />
hadn't signed the whole thing. I've got a picture of him as a 20-<br />
year-old or thereabouts, talking at this little convention.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You showed it to him?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. I gave him a copy. The problem I had is that...some people<br />
keep everything. I pretty much give everything away.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, you are lying. You keep everything.<br />
<br />
David: I do keep a lot of stuff. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Then, you give it away later. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Well, when Stan Freiberger was putting together the "Fire in<br />
the Valley" book, I gave him a lot of photographs and I gave him<br />
the originals. Then the publisher said, "It's not good enough. The<br />
photo. You get the negative." OK, they're gone. Never any of that<br />
came back. In fact, what I had to do is scan the photo from the<br />
book to make the print to give to Bill.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Photos of being young and cute.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was his Woody Allen phase. He looked exactly like Woody Allen<br />
did at that phase in his life.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:26:30] too.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm sure there is.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It is a lot [inaudible 01:26:33] .<br />
<br />
David: She improves with age. Every year.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I saw the picture! You look the same.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, the instant Paul Allen showed up, of course, everybody's<br />
mingling around this museum. All of a sudden there was like an<br />
arrow head over in that direction.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was this sucking sound.<br />
<br />
David: And then Bill shows up and, oh my God, everybody has to go see<br />
Bill.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was talking to Bob Rynett this morning, the guy who organized it,<br />
and he said, "Oh, Paul was very happy. Paul was very pleased with<br />
the way the event went." He said his only regret was that he and<br />
Bill didn't have enough time to spend with the people. And I'm<br />
thinking, "Well, OK, if you just stayed a little longer."<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Well, at least Paul Allen did come to the dinner.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, he stayed a little longer, but Bill, he was in and out like<br />
a...<br />
<br />
David: Bill was there for maybe an hour.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He just showed up because he had to.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, exactly. It was a cameo.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:27:52] cameo there?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, yes. There I am. I was thinner then. Oh! There's Ted in his<br />
hat! And Peter [inaudible 01:28:02] . Who's that guy?<br />
<br />
David: Dick Heiser was at the convention and he had one of the hats. The<br />
Xanadu hat.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was wearing one of those hats. The rings were actually silver.<br />
Oh and there's Johnny Anderson. He's the one that wrote that<br />
crazy...<br />
<br />
This was our building.<br />
<br />
David: That was the greenhouse garage building that we started. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: And there was a hole. Was it you or my brother that made a hole in<br />
the wall for an air conditioner?<br />
<br />
David: It was your brother.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And the building was painted white after...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is that the air conditioner? You comment about the low tech air<br />
conditioning.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, that was in an actual window. This building had been painted<br />
white after and right about here a hole had been made in the wall<br />
for this through-the-wall air conditioner. It was rented and when<br />
we moved out, we had this hole in the wall. So, my brother takes<br />
this spare ceiling panel that we had. It was white and sort of<br />
stuffed it in the hole and filled it up so that it really didn't<br />
show any more. We never heard any more about it.<br />
<br />
David: That building today is...<br />
<br />
Betsy: They've made it very fancy.<br />
<br />
David: Oh my gosh! It's a boutique shop and it's really nice. And they<br />
didn't even tear it down. It wasn't a tear-down and rebuild. At any<br />
event, we were not into spending money on facilities. Absolutely<br />
not. The last place that we were in was a printing company had<br />
owned it and they had taken three very small houses that backed up<br />
to railroad tracks and then they built a large warehouse at the end<br />
that was relatively modern. Then they just connected the three<br />
houses with little walkway and so we were in the first house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You couldn't tell that it was two houses.<br />
<br />
David: No. The art department was in the second, then the software group<br />
was in the third one. We had our fulfillment and storage and stuff<br />
in the warehouse.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How much money did you spend on the facility?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not much.<br />
<br />
David: We were spending money on expansion, growing, grow, grow. Then Ziff<br />
Davis comes in, they say, "You got this wonderful warehouse."<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's our warehouse now, right?<br />
<br />
David: That's right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It wasn't though, because you owned it.<br />
<br />
David: I know, but in any event, they said we're going to use it. We're<br />
moving some of your operation, advertising, sales into New York,<br />
therefore you will have more space. It wasn't the trade-off of the<br />
same kind of space or anything. What they did is, they have all<br />
these other magazines at that point, things like "Popular Boating"<br />
and "Yachting" and everything else. All of those magazines, when<br />
you subscribed you got a premium. You got a tote bag or something.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A backpack or a cushion.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. They moved all of their premium fulfillment out to our<br />
warehouse. They said, "Because you're not going to have a software<br />
department anymore, so you won't have to ship any software. We're<br />
going to bring all of our premiums out there." We still have<br />
"Yachting" bags.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yachting bags and seat bags.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Speaking of fulfillment that was something that we did. We were<br />
real pioneers in doing our own fulfillment.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: That's true...<br />
<br />
Betsy: All magazines then used fulfillment houses. You would just send all<br />
the little cards and white mail and everything to your fulfillment<br />
house and they would just take care, enter it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Reader service cards and...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Exactly, and then they would send the labels.<br />
<br />
David: Everything went either to Boulder, Colorado, Des Moines, Iowa, or<br />
some place in Florida.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So when you say pioneers, does that mean you were cheap?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well no, because we were not getting good service, we weren't happy<br />
with the service the readers were getting. And so we decided to<br />
bring it in it house, and we brought a program from a company in<br />
Boston that had written a program to run a PDP11.<br />
And we did we brought the whole thing in-house. We had our own data<br />
entry people. Did all the caging, taking the money out in-house.<br />
Printed our own labels and ship, because then you had to print them<br />
and ship them because there was no electronic delivery.<br />
<br />
David: You know we were real pioneers there and we did spent some money.<br />
Because PDP1170 was not a low-end, with a platter and disk, 12<br />
inch, maybe 15 inch, but a big, big platter drive, and data entry<br />
terminals, DECWriters, VT05. And when Ziff came in, I mean they<br />
were blown away that we were doing our own fulfillment, and doing a<br />
very efficiently.<br />
And the other thing we were doing also was the reader service<br />
cards. We were doing all our own processing of that. The same<br />
computer is same system. A Mini Data System, that's what it was.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No.<br />
<br />
David: No? OK.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mini data was the one you were using...<br />
<br />
[Day 2]<br />
<br />
<br />
David: A couple of the questions you asked yesterday got us to thinking<br />
about things we probably should have mentioned or clarified.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK let's go, let me grab a pen.<br />
<br />
David: One of the corrections, Betsy remembered better than I. the<br />
embezzlement that we were talking about was actually 79 not 78 it<br />
doesn't make a lot of difference but was a year later. It was a<br />
year after I had left my day job, and I was really depending upon<br />
Creative Computing for my income and everything else. So to lose<br />
that was a big blow at that time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So that could have been the end of things right there?<br />
<br />
David: Yes absolutely it could have.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was 79 not 78, is what you're saying.<br />
<br />
David: That's what I said it was 79 not 78.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I was going to ask you to move closer to the microphone.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Actually I don't have to do this. My ego is completely uninvolved.<br />
I would go sit and play with the cats.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Please, please be here. You supplement Dave's memory.<br />
<br />
David: Yes exactly she's very good at that.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: I want to know, how are you going to know how to spell things? He<br />
used the name John Dilks. If you go to write it out, how do you<br />
know how to spell John Dilks?<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'll either Google it, and if it's not in Wikipedia, I'll have to<br />
come back to you and ask, or if they're mentioned in the magazines.<br />
I'll do my best.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm not saying it in a critical way, I'm just impressed that you<br />
don't ask.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just feel this way, I can have everything. I don't have to write<br />
it down. I can concentrate on the conversation, rather than taking<br />
notes.<br />
<br />
David: OK. One thing I thought would be kind of worthwhile...putting the<br />
whole era of the early computer magazines into a perspective. In a<br />
sense, personal computing itself went through several eras as it<br />
accelerated and became so widespread. It certainly didn't start<br />
that way.<br />
You almost have to look at a period before there were personal<br />
computers -- the pre-personal computer era, which I would say would<br />
be 1972 or so up through '75, when the first computers came out.<br />
What was happening then was you had big time-sharing systems.<br />
<br />
Then, manufacturers like DEC and HP were making smaller time-<br />
sharing systems for terminals on a computer. Specifically, Bob<br />
Albrecht opened up People's Computer Company down in San Carlos,<br />
San Mateo, one of the "Sans." It was an open to the public place.<br />
What were people going to do with computers? Well, he wrote this<br />
book of what to do after you hit return, of games.<br />
<br />
Then I wrote my book, not for his center, but for people in the<br />
east that had access to the same type of things on DEC computers.<br />
Those two books actually came out in '72. That was well<br />
before....There was an impetus for people to use computers. Even<br />
though it was mini-computers and they didn't really have their own,<br />
they did have access.<br />
<br />
That, I think, was an important thing because, then, when the kit<br />
computers first came out, which is '75, we really had the kit<br />
computer era from '75 to around '78. That's when it primary was,<br />
the do-it-yourself, build-it-yourself.<br />
<br />
Who did those computers appeal to? It was largely people who were<br />
OK with things like soldering guns. That was largely HAM radio<br />
people. You look at "73" magazine and "Radio Electronics," those<br />
were the ones that dragged the hardware people into the field, and<br />
"Popular Electronics," of course, with the Altair in January, '75.<br />
<br />
You had to know something about, and be a little bit capable with<br />
your hands to get into it. That continued but dwindled off by 1980,<br />
because of course, in '78, you had the three biggies, not biggies,<br />
but self-contained, assembled computers: the Commodore PET, TRS-80,<br />
and the Apple all came out in '78. They were proprietary platforms,<br />
nobody was sharing stuff.<br />
<br />
Actually, the S-100 bus was more shareable. More people got a card<br />
that you could plug into the S-100 bus. There was more, but on the<br />
other hand, you had to build it. That was really a stumbling block<br />
for a lot of people. Then processor technology with the SAL. OK,<br />
here's an S-100 bus machine, but it's all built. That was a big<br />
leap.<br />
<br />
Anyway, you had the, what I call, proprietary era from '78 to '82.<br />
Then it kind of dwindled off, although Apple certainly kept going.<br />
When the IBM PC came out, '81, '82, '83, that ushered in the<br />
standardization era. Everybody, "OK, we're going to make an IBM PC<br />
clone." It was really only Apple, and to a lesser extent, the Atari<br />
and the Commodore that kept going with their own proprietary stuff.<br />
They really couldn't keep going.<br />
<br />
At that time, we started working with Atari. They using the same<br />
chip that Apple had. I thought, "Man, that's an opportunity. Why<br />
don't they just make an agreement with Apple to run Apple software<br />
and everything." They got a 6502, that family of chips in there,<br />
why not? But that wasn't Atari's way of doing things, as you well<br />
know.<br />
<br />
In any event, they went through those stages. As a new one came<br />
along, the other one died off. That though then affected the<br />
magazines, Creative Computing, we came from the pre-era, in a<br />
sense. From the education applications and people having access to<br />
small, minicomputer time sharing systems. When Altair basic was<br />
announced, then it was the obvious thing that we would port over<br />
programs to that.<br />
<br />
Other magazines such as "Byte" and some of the hardware magazines,<br />
they really came from the HAM radio end of things. Wayne Green, who<br />
started "Byte," was publishing "73," which was the biggest magazine<br />
in HAM radio. HAM fests were one of the earliest places where<br />
computers were, or at least hardware, do-it-yourself computers were<br />
really seen and popularized. Wasn't till a little later that we had<br />
computer festivals.<br />
<br />
The real early computer festivals in '75, '76, had a big overlap<br />
with Ham radio. The early ones in New Jersey. That was the earliest<br />
ones. It was, I think, more, not more, but at least half was<br />
oriented to Ham radio. Then, it broadened out, of course, with more<br />
applications being reproduced. Anyway, I think it's kind of<br />
important to know how things fit into that whole scheme of things.<br />
<br />
Magazines either came from the Ham radio and hardware side of<br />
things. They had a different perspective than those like Creative<br />
Computing.<br />
<br />
Well, Peoples' Computer Company, Bob Aldberg, could have had a real<br />
winning magazine, but he was too much in the alternative mode. So,<br />
Peoples' Computer Company never really made it as a magazine. He<br />
didn't want to do advertising or anything that would...<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was a different avenue. It was more like a tabloid-style<br />
newspaper.<br />
<br />
David: Newspaper, yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was more glossy.<br />
<br />
David: Exactly.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was a very different field.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Again, magazine publishing. I remember, early on, I was on a<br />
TV show. McNeil Lehrer Report on Public Broadcasting. Life Magazine<br />
was being re-launched and Time-Warner was spending a ton of money<br />
on this re-launch. They had the publisher of Life Magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was probably Time-Life back then. I don't think it...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. That's right. It wasn't Time. Well, I think it was close to<br />
the time that they merged. Anyway. Yeah. It was Time-Life. Then,<br />
they had me. Sort of the opposite extreme.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You're going to be covered in cat hair by the time you're here.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, I am sure.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's OK. But it matches and sort of goes with it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. It matches fine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You have kind of a theme here. The black and white.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes. Yes. Sorry to interrupt.<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, they were interviewing both of us. They were going to spend<br />
more money on their first issue than our entire annual budget, for<br />
everything. The difference in big publishers, because we we're<br />
talking about that a little bit yesterday, is huge. Really huge.<br />
Now, the interesting thing is there was a magazine back then. I<br />
don't know if it's still around today, called Folio. It was a<br />
magazine for magazine publishers. They covered all aspects of it.<br />
Subscription fulfillment, typesetting and everything else and the<br />
business aspects of running a magazine.<br />
<br />
They had some figures, which were true for a long period of time.<br />
That one out of seven magazine startups makes it for one year. One<br />
out of seven. That's low. Of those, one out of seven makes it for<br />
five years. So, were talking about...<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think Wayne told me almost the exact same statistic.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. One out of 50 new magazines makes it for five years or more.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: Once you make it five years, you're probably good to go for awhile.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
The new Life Magazine comes back, roaring back in. Where are they<br />
today, or even 10 years later from that point. Gone. Didn't make<br />
it. In any event, yesterday we were talking a little bit about<br />
where did we put all our money.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
David: Well, all our money wasn't an awful lot compared to big publishers.<br />
We were a small player. We're big in that field, but...<br />
<br />
Kevin: You're a big fish in a little bowl.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Yeah. There wasn't a lot. Betsy reminded me this morning that<br />
one of the things we did to, in a sense, keep control, is we bought<br />
our own typesetting equipment.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Used of course.<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Used.<br />
<br />
David: Used. Yes. We didn't want to send stuff out to a typesetter<br />
where...what did you [inaudible 00:14:22] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was the same thing with the fulfillment. You are sending it to a<br />
service that gives your work to a minimum wage person who couldn't<br />
care less. Puts her time in and...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Plus you still had code and things that needed to be done right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Done right. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Otherwise it was useless.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. We didn't typeset the code usually. We would actually pace<br />
down the printouts. Part of it was for efficiency and probably, in<br />
the long run, it was cheaper. Just to turn your typesetting around,<br />
send it out and wait for your galleys to come back. Then you<br />
proofread them. Then you'd send it back. Then they make the<br />
corrections maybe and you get it back again. So we said, well...and<br />
then we got this used, copy graphic was it?<br />
<br />
David: Mm-hmm. Yep.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Typesetter. Found a young woman who knew typesetting and hired her.<br />
We bought our own stat camera. We always used to have to send all<br />
the stats and [inaudible 00:15:34] out to be made.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: That was huge then before...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Had our own darkroom.<br />
<br />
David: ...everything was computerized publishing. Yeah. We had our own<br />
darkroom and our own stat camera with the thing that goes over a<br />
screen basically to make it into dots.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: To do that. To make those negatives or [inaudible 00:15:56] , which<br />
are the positive. That was something again. You sent it out and you<br />
get it back.<br />
I said, "Oh, you know what, we got a little more type here than<br />
expected. We want to crop this. Well, we send it out again, and oh<br />
my gosh." Doing all of that in-house, but it cost money. In a<br />
sense, just for the hardware and capital improvements that you<br />
needed to do that.<br />
<br />
We were spending it on that and expansion into other things like<br />
the software. One of the other ones that I was thinking of that we<br />
did, that certainly, really didn't bring us any tangible reward,<br />
was that we were doing some consulting when we started developing<br />
software. We started doing consulting to places like the<br />
Exploratorium in San Francisco. And Sesame Place. That was a big<br />
one for us.<br />
<br />
Sesame Place was a theme park right in our own backyard in New<br />
Jersey. They were going to have these terminals that you could go<br />
up to. One of the programs was Mix and Match the Muppets. You could<br />
take different parts of Muppets and combine them. We wrote a part<br />
of that routine and a whole bunch of stuff that made computers and<br />
these things not computers but approachable things for kids.<br />
<br />
We did some work for the Capital Children's Museum in Washington<br />
and Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Again, did it help us?<br />
Maybe. Did we gain a little reputation? Maybe. Did it translate to<br />
the bottom line? Probably not. As Betsy said, it was fun for you to<br />
do that, wasn't it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, it was fun. It gave him fun things to do.<br />
<br />
David: That was one way that we, in a sense, spent some money.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It makes sense. You guys were the computer experts, probably by<br />
orders of magnitude. Who are they going to go to?<br />
<br />
David: That's right. Interactive games, yeah. I already had a good selling<br />
book out there that was visible, known. We did a lot of that kind<br />
of stuff. Some of it was just fun to do. Another place where we put<br />
I won't say a lot of money but we went to a lot of these shows,<br />
well, there were some that were strictly personal computer shows,<br />
but then also tried to push into things like the consumer<br />
electronics show.<br />
We were the only magazine at the consumer electronics. That's a<br />
huge, huge show. Twice a year, one in Chicago and one in Las Vegas.<br />
We'd take the smallest booth that you could but, still, it was a<br />
fair chunk of change to go to that, but that's how I felt we got<br />
the reach. They were pushing at a lower level. That was video games<br />
mostly at that point. Although we weren't in that market, I just<br />
felt that that was someplace that we wanted to be.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you think that was worthwhile?<br />
<br />
David: I don't know. We were mainly looking for retail stores to sell the<br />
magazine. That was my main purpose for going there. No, it probably<br />
wasn't. It probably was not and it cost us a lot of money to go to<br />
the shows. You have to experiment and do those things. We started<br />
reporting on new developments at the consumer electronics show and<br />
there was some overlap with Computer Inc but it was mostly video<br />
games. No, it didn't have a real good payoff. [laughs]<br />
Then there was the Boston show we went to where Betsy's feistiness<br />
really came out. You go to those shows. I'm not talking about one<br />
of these local computer shows or something. You go to a big show.<br />
You've got to use union labor. We had a computer at our booth. We<br />
wanted to plug it in. You're going to plug in your computer? No,<br />
you can't plug it in. You've got to hire an electrician for an hour<br />
for $75 to plug in your computer.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was a bit extreme. I don't think that was actually true.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know how much it was but you had to use union labor for<br />
different things. Betsy took exception to that at one show and<br />
actually came to blows.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was carrying stuff off the show floor. We were trying to get out.<br />
It was in Boston and we were going to drive back and we were trying<br />
to...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Go home at the end of the show?<br />
<br />
Betsy: ...go home at the end of the show. We were just carrying our<br />
cartons of leftover magazines and books and some union guy comes to<br />
me and starts telling me you can't do this and he was being very<br />
rude. So I punched him in the arm. [laughs] They were not happy.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you have to hire a special punching person to do that?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yes, exactly. I should have consulted with the shop steward before<br />
doing that.<br />
<br />
David: There was a follow-up to that. I'm not absolutely sure but I think<br />
the guy that was running that show was Shelley Adelman. He then<br />
approached us after that little incident. You can't do this. Betsy<br />
was really in his face about come on. We're a tiny little nit. Sure<br />
we can do it. We can carry our own stuff.<br />
Shelley Adelman, whose name you probably heard today, in a sense,<br />
got his start by running these smaller shows around the country and<br />
then he built up to running PC Expo in New York and Las Vegas and<br />
then he got into you run a show in Las Vegas you've got to make<br />
deals with the hotels and so on.<br />
<br />
The earlier PC shows in Las Vegas did not use the convention<br />
center. They were held in I think probably the Hilton. He got to<br />
know hotel people there and he started buying into hotels and today<br />
Shelley Adelman is huge. Not Caesars but he owns one of the really<br />
big casino operations. He's on Forbes list of top 100 wealthiest<br />
Americans.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sure he only uses union labor.<br />
<br />
David: I'm sure he does, absolutely. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's how he got where he is.<br />
<br />
David: We've crossed paths with some interesting people in different ways.<br />
There was another one I was thinking of. Actually, this is jumping<br />
around a little bit. Editorial, in different people submitting<br />
articles and then some people I would ask would you do something<br />
for us early, early on. That's another thing we went to. I went to<br />
comic cons and the sci-fi cons to promote the magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was early.<br />
<br />
David: That was early, very early. I've got to tell you one little<br />
incident there. I also went to small press publisher conventions. I<br />
went to one over Labor Day weekend, and I don't know what year it<br />
was. It was probably '75, '76 maybe. The place that they gave this<br />
small press to exhibit was one platform up in the subway under<br />
Lincoln Center.<br />
Lincoln Center, of course, huge, but down one level is not shops.<br />
There may be a few shops but it was a big, open platform. That's<br />
where we were exhibiting. I had my magazines out there on a table<br />
and I was talking to these other underground publishers and so on,<br />
typical.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's why they put you there. It's underground.<br />
<br />
David: Underground, yes. It was a Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Saturday,<br />
Sunday, Monday. I said, "I can't be here on Sunday." Talked to the<br />
person next to me and I said, "I'm just going to leave a cigar box<br />
that says put your money in the box." He said, "You're nuts. We're<br />
in a New York subway system. You're going to come back with nothing<br />
in your box." I left a bunch of change in it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: And your ex-wife said you were too trusting.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] Yes. I left like 15 single dollar bills in there so people<br />
could make change and I just left it there, from Saturday to Monday<br />
and I came back Monday, about $40, $50 in the box. I don't know<br />
whether it paid for everything that was taken but it worked out<br />
fine. Yes, I was obviously too trusting, but at roughly the same<br />
time there was something going on. I think it was a sci-fi<br />
convention or world future society. Yeah, it was world future<br />
society convention.<br />
They had some notable people there. I was sitting down with Alvin<br />
Toffler in the lobby of the Colosseum and along comes over to us<br />
Isaac [inaudible 00:27:03] . What a wonderful little party. We had<br />
some coffee in the Colosseum and I said, "Isaac, can you write me<br />
an article?" "I got a good story from the iRobot series that hasn't<br />
been widely used or published and you can use that." So I got an<br />
early contribution from Isaac [inaudible 00:27:27] and Alvin<br />
Toffler wrote something for us.<br />
<br />
Anyway, got to know some interesting people at that point. Then who<br />
should submit an article, and by this time Betsy was the editor...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Out of transom comes an article from Michael Creighton. It was a<br />
program. I can't remember what it was about.<br />
<br />
David: For the Apple.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was a program for the Apple, but it was something really dumb.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know if you remember, we were reminded when Harry Garland<br />
was up at the thing in Seattle. Harry Garland was one of the first<br />
ones to produce an independent manufactured a board, a 100 bus<br />
board, for the Altair, and this was really early, and he called it<br />
the TV Dazzler. It made little squares light up but he could make<br />
lots of them light up in different colors or just a few. It was a<br />
silly program but people said we can do graphics on this.<br />
He eventually developed it into quite an interesting graphics tool,<br />
I guess. People did buy the TV Dazzler for itself but the purpose<br />
was here's a board you could produce graphics, do some graphics. In<br />
any event, that's essentially what Michael Creighton's program did<br />
for the Apple. Not much.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This was not early on.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, it was after the Apple 2 was out.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was probably...<br />
<br />
David: '80.<br />
<br />
Betsy: 1980, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you publish it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. I rejected it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: I'm like we're going to reject an article from Michael Creighton?<br />
<br />
Betsy: We both liked Michael Creighton as an article.<br />
<br />
David: Oh my gosh. But we did. We really did. We had standards.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Later on, though, he wrote something. It was better. It wasn't<br />
great. He did write something better and we did accept it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Orson Scott Card wrote for Compute, I think. I don't know if he was<br />
Orson Scott Card at that point, but [inaudible 00:30:00] .<br />
<br />
David: We've crossed paths with some people.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [inaudible 00:30:09] was actually very nice<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, 6 foot 8, big guy. He was very nice. Unfortunately, he died.<br />
On the other end of things, early on, we really were...this was<br />
probably even before Betsy got in...kind of in the small press<br />
underground publishing movement as much as in the legitimate big<br />
magazines, because that's kind of where I started.<br />
<br />
Betsy: When I came, we had just published the first sleek, coated paper<br />
magazine and coated stock. In October 1978, I believe, that was<br />
published. That was the first of the coated stock. That was kind of<br />
the bridge to legitimacy.<br />
<br />
David: For the first two years, [inaudible 00:31:09] news print and I had<br />
a little tie in with some of the small press people. I was learning<br />
about publishing from small press review, I got to know some of the<br />
people who were doing successful publishing. A lot of them were<br />
magazines and comics out of San Francisco.<br />
So I got to know a little bit [inaudible 00:31:46] and Gilbert<br />
Shelton and Sherry Flannigan, and some of those early, Bobby<br />
London. So anyway, one ad we ran real early on was an adaptation of<br />
Renee and Robert Crompton. Go ahead and change my thing to creative<br />
computing. Go for it. Sherry Flannigan she did a comic strip called<br />
Tronch and Bonnie, Tronch was a little dog and Bonnie was a little<br />
girl and they occasionally got mixed up with a robot dog.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there some sort of falling out with that person?<br />
<br />
David: With Sherry? No. I'm still friends with her on Facebook. They had a<br />
major, major problem, she was involved with Gary Hallgrin and I<br />
forget who the publisher was, McNeil, Bobby London. They were the<br />
Air Pirates funniest group that Disney took to task, that caused<br />
the death of a lot of publishing in the underground comics<br />
movement.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I don't understand.<br />
<br />
David: Air Pirates were funny, they were just looking for trouble. They<br />
had Disney characters flying planes and getting into all kinds of<br />
trouble and getting into problems that Disney characters never<br />
would have done, sexual problems as well as just acting badly.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Disney just said, "We can't put up with this." It was an<br />
interesting case, because was it a copyright violation, not really<br />
because they were character look-a-likes, but they weren't calling<br />
them Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck but they looked the same or very<br />
similar. But, it was a landmark case in underground comics, it<br />
caused a lot of them to pull back, a lot on the satire and stuff<br />
that they were publishing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I asked about Sherry because a number of years ago when I had first<br />
put the best of [inaudible 00:34:29] on my website, then after a<br />
while I got an email saying, "Look, you have to take this<br />
[inaudible 00:34:37] ." I would copyright all, it was just like<br />
waving arms. So I took it down but it was, I thought, maybe it<br />
was...<br />
<br />
David: Well that whole copyright trademark thing, there interpretation<br />
that really, really strict...everything that goes on the Internet<br />
is a public domain. Well, that is not really true either. Are you<br />
making money from copyrighted material? If you are then that's a<br />
pretty clear violation. Are you affecting the copyright owners<br />
ability to make money with it? That's a violation.<br />
I'm kind of in this right now with Uruguay and TinTin, those books<br />
have inspired a lot of people to make parodies and fake TinTin<br />
covers. TinTin at the beach, places TinTin wouldn't normally go.<br />
Well is it affecting the sales of TinTin books, or is it actually<br />
increasingly them?<br />
<br />
Casterman, who owns and [inaudible 00:36:07] owns the TinTin<br />
copyrights. They are really going after some of these people, but<br />
I'm not sure that they have a really good case. So some people take<br />
everything off and don't want nothing on the website. And others<br />
are saying, "Hey, this is legitimate." I have collected a lot of<br />
those covers, and put them up on a website.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I guess you'll find out soon enough.<br />
<br />
David: I will find out, soon enough.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They may not be right legally, but how hard do you want to fight<br />
it.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: I think that they have to demonstrate that it's hurting them in<br />
some way. One last thing, from the question you asked yesterday,<br />
back to the money issue, when I sold the magazine, right at that<br />
time I took 15 percent of what I had received, and donated it to<br />
charities. I have in a sense signed on, although not as an official<br />
signee to the Gates-Buffet initiative to give away half of my<br />
wealth, while I am alive.<br />
At one point in time you can compute that, I have already given<br />
away more than I have received for Creative Computing to Charity.<br />
Of course, it had grown a little bit and we made reasonably decent<br />
investments and that is why it continued to grow. But, I'm really<br />
committed to doing that. My kids are not going to inherit it all.<br />
That's just the way it is, that is the way I believe. Put my money<br />
where my heart is. Anyway,<br />
<br />
Kevin: Other question is, you said something yesterday, I should follow up<br />
that one. You said something about stealing Basic.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well there was this big thing. Just the night before last, at this<br />
dinner we went to, where all the people who were at the first MITS<br />
conference and they referred to the letter that Bill Gates wrote.<br />
<br />
Kevin: "Why are you stealing my software?"<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well exactly. That was just a reference to that Bill Gates, which<br />
had just been brought back to my memory by that. People were<br />
telling stories at this. Instead of having an after dinner speaker<br />
they were just passing the mic around and people were talking about<br />
incidents and things from the past.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you get to sell the story to this group of...?<br />
<br />
David: Not really, I was just followed up on something [inaudible<br />
00:39:24] .<br />
<br />
Betsy: Some of those stories were really boring.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: Oh yeah, long and boring. It's an interesting thing though, about<br />
basic itself, but it was developed at an educational institution<br />
originally by Kemeny and Kurtz at Dartmouth. And they, either<br />
deliberately or because they had gotten a lot of grant money from<br />
General Electric in the early time sharing systems, they basically<br />
let anybody use their Basic.<br />
It was developed at Dartmouth but later Honeywell put a system in<br />
at Minnesota or Florida or someplace else. They could use Basic,<br />
they could have a no license fee or anything. That made Basic a<br />
universal language that was available, at least that version of<br />
Basic. If you write a different version of Basic, where does that<br />
fall? These are some sort of violation and you need some<br />
permission. And basically Kemeny and Kurtz said, "No, you don't."<br />
And they allowed Basic to be used and developed by others.<br />
<br />
Digital Equipment, at the same time, maybe even earlier, but<br />
roughly the same time, had developed also an interactive language<br />
called Focal. And Focal in many regards was more efficient than<br />
Basic, because they were running it on many computer and there was<br />
less memory to work with. On the other hand, and this was true<br />
Digital...as time went on, they said, "No, nobody can use Focal. We<br />
are not going to let, especially those people [inaudible 00:41:59]<br />
." But any place else, nobody could use Focal.<br />
<br />
I think it wound up with a situation like Sony and Betamax. Sony<br />
saying, "Betamax is ours and it is a better format that VHS," which<br />
it was. But then, JVC saying, "We have VHS and Toshiba. Hey do you<br />
want to use it? Fine, we'll license it to you for next to nothing."<br />
<br />
Kevin: You think Focal could have been Basic.<br />
<br />
David: I think it could have been very big. I think it could there could<br />
have been very serious competition between the two languages, but<br />
by Digital limiting it only to their own computers and specifically<br />
to their mini computers, not even the big mainframes, it really<br />
limited the spread of Focal. In fact, it forced me to go out to the<br />
developers and people in educational institutions they wanted<br />
Basic.<br />
There were few schools and colleges in Boston area, near DEC that<br />
were OK with Focal. But stuff was getting published by Minnesota<br />
Educational Computer Consortium and others in Basic, [inaudible<br />
00:43:32] computer project. So they wanted Basic. [laughs] I had to<br />
go on. I hired one group, actually it turned out to be just an<br />
individual guy in Brooklyn that developed a Basic for 4KPDP8. Well<br />
Basic took 3.5K, I gave you 500 words, 512 bit not even the 16 bit,<br />
at least get 2 bits per...but 500 words the right programs. Wasn't<br />
much.<br />
<br />
So that forced Lunar Lander and [inaudible 00:44:15] and some of<br />
those programs actually. Some of them I imported over from Focal<br />
into Basic. And then we had a machine that had 8K. We had a<br />
different version of Basic because Hewlett Packard had a machine<br />
that read cards, mark sense cards. We had to have a different<br />
version of basic for that. Then we had a timeshare Basic. We had<br />
six versions of Basic, five actually on the PDP8 family. It was<br />
absurd, it was crazy, but we had to do it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I was going to ask you, the process of like...you started<br />
saying...you interrupted yourself. You said, "People would submit<br />
articles and then..." I don't know what you were going to say next.<br />
But [inaudible 00:45:08] that I wanted to ask you like just the<br />
process of how the magazine got made. You got an article was,<br />
somebody just typed up or something and...<br />
<br />
Betsy: You mean the mechanics of the production?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We can receive most of the articles for the magazine came over the<br />
transom. And we would get these articles and our editorial system<br />
would log them in and pass them around to editorial staff. John<br />
Anderson and Russell [inaudible 00:45:42] .<br />
<br />
David: Peter Fee.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Peter Fee.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What does it mean over the transom?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Means they weren't solicited. Somebody in the middle of the night<br />
jumped to know [laughs] or through the mailbox. We put a little<br />
piece of paper on there and the guys would write their opinions.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] That is serious.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Some of the things they said. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Like what? What would they say?<br />
<br />
Betsy: "Don't quit your day job." [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: And then they had the rubber stamp.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Somebody found a stamp. Everything that we had was used, including<br />
our desk and everything. And somebody found, at the back of the<br />
desk, a stamp. It said San Marcos on it. This was like the ultimate<br />
insult. [laughs] San Marcos, like you know, "Get out of here."<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Send it to San Marcos?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Send it to San Marcos, wherever that was. Ultimately, I would make<br />
the final decision whether we were going to publish this or not.<br />
Once we were well established, the vast majority of them went back.<br />
We never returned manuscripts. And they would come with piles of<br />
code. A lot of them were programs and, we would decide and the<br />
editorial assistants job to notify the person. Then we bought all<br />
rights, didn't we?<br />
<br />
David: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
Betsy: North American Serial rights, that's what we bought for everything.<br />
Then they would go into a cube. Sometimes we would say something,<br />
"Oh, this is going to go really well with this educational<br />
institute that we're doing in June," Like that one is for June or<br />
just put it in the queue and we will see when it comes or rises to<br />
the top or whatever.<br />
The more technical editors like, John Anderson, he was our best guy<br />
ever. They would go through the code and make sure the code worked,<br />
and I would edit them for content and correct them.<br />
<br />
David: For English and Grammar.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, with a pen and pencil. Then they would go to our typesetter.<br />
Typesetter would correct them. And then they would come back, and I<br />
think, our lower level editorial assistant would proofread them,<br />
but proofread a lot of them too. When they came out typesetter, it<br />
was on a smooth shiny paper.<br />
<br />
David: Photographic paper.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And then, if they had screenshots or anything the art department<br />
would make them into photo stats or [inaudible 00:49:02] . And then<br />
when it was time for them to go to press they would put them on<br />
boards, pieces of cardboard, white paper...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So you paste up?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, they do the paste up and put it on there.<br />
<br />
David: The boards were using non reproducing blue on its photograph. They<br />
had different outlines, blue defined columns, both two and three<br />
column pages and upper limits and page numbers and all that kind of<br />
stuff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: We were still doing it on [inaudible 00:49:43] newspaper in 1990.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well that's exactly it, so you know what we're talking about. And<br />
then once you get it all together and then again somebody has got<br />
to read it to make sure there is no lines left out, particularly of<br />
the programs. Make sure that those all still make sense. There were<br />
many cases where line got left out or artists cuts off a things and<br />
realizes, "Oh, I mean to cut it short." And that whole line<br />
disappears and then you send it off to be printed and all the<br />
subscribers get a little upset because Startrek doesn't run.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: So that sort of thing happened frequently or often?<br />
<br />
David: With typeset material, not much at all. But with program listings,<br />
program listings were really tough. Because you would have people<br />
that would submit something, and they'd have a really cheap, low-<br />
end dot matrix printer. And we always encouraged people, if you're<br />
going to submit a program, submit it in some machine-readable form.<br />
So we don't want to type them all in to make sure they work. Even<br />
though our readers are going to have to, but we don't want to have<br />
to do that. So send us. But even so, we might then print it off on<br />
one of our slightly higher end printers. But I'll tell you what,<br />
you have page breaks and everything else. And the Art department<br />
didn't have a clue about programs and stuff. The program would get<br />
stated down. We weren't using the full sized type for program<br />
listings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. At that point we hadn't the ability to make them fit.<br />
<br />
David: That's where the most common place that you'd lose a line or<br />
something. It would get photographed, and when it's coming out of a<br />
line printer, you might have one or two lines on the following<br />
page. "Oh, we forgot that."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Personally, I know it said so much about magazine that when it<br />
continued, there were just sometimes a handwritten area going,<br />
"Continued over here." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Oh, absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was a early.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It wasn't professional, and that was awesome. It was just like,<br />
"OK."<br />
<br />
Betsy: Then what we would do, we would request when we...we would solicit<br />
articles. Like if there was a new Apple peripheral that we wanted<br />
to review, we'd get the product. Then a lot of times, our own guys<br />
wanted to review the stuff, but if it was something that we didn't<br />
have time for, or that was better suited to one of our freelancers,<br />
we would send it out and ask for a review of it.<br />
A lot of reviews came in over the transom too, but we tried to be<br />
careful of those, that they were not either trying to justify their<br />
own purchase of whatever it was or get even with the publisher for<br />
producing it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Or written by the... [crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: That really wasn't an issue at the time, it was a more innocent<br />
time. That really didn't happen much, but it was, sometimes, people<br />
would get a product they didn't care for and totally bash it, then<br />
we have to go and figure out is it really that bad. We tend to not<br />
produce seriously negative...if it was a really bad product we just<br />
ignored it.<br />
<br />
David: We tried to be objective with reviews, but before I got into the<br />
computer field at all I was in market research. There are a number<br />
of biases, too, that really overwhelmingly affect all kinds of<br />
market research polls or surveys. One is that people think they're<br />
better than they are. For example, if we were doing a poll or a<br />
research study, we'd put a question on basically designed to show<br />
the executives who were using this data that there were some<br />
biases.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He's not talking about Creative Computing.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: No, no. This was way earlier. I'm talking about Proctor and Gamble<br />
products or general foods or that kind of thing. Anyways, the<br />
question we put on was "please rank your driving ability," and we<br />
had from well below average, accident waiting to happen up to Mario<br />
Andretti, Danica Patrick, over there. And you know what, 99 percent<br />
of the population ranked themselves better than the average. Where<br />
is your average then? Its way high.<br />
The other thing, equally pervasive in a sense, is that people<br />
wanted to justify a decision, a purchase decision. In fact, back<br />
the 30s, the slogan for Ford Motor Company was ask a man that owns<br />
one. You ask a man that owns and has made a decision to buy this<br />
car, he's going to say "Yeah, it is the greatest car." So you put<br />
on questions, again, throwaway questions.<br />
<br />
If you had this, or if you were an owner of whatever car it is that<br />
you have. "What do you have now? Would you buy another one?" People<br />
"Oh, yes. This is a great decision. I love this car." I'll tell you<br />
where you can find out, is you look at what percentage of people<br />
that did own that particular car did buy another one? They're<br />
always way lower than they those that say they would buy another<br />
one. It gets more pronounced with higher prices.<br />
<br />
If you've made a decision to buy a high-priced car, you're going to<br />
think, "I'll tell you what. This Land Rover was the best car I have<br />
ever bought." 78 percent of people might say, "I'm going to buy<br />
another one." About 15 percent of the people actually do.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So [inaudible 00:56:49] magazine because people want to justify a<br />
review.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. That's exactly right. And as Betsy said, it could go the<br />
other way, too. "I think I'm getting screwed here with this product<br />
and I'm going to knock it." When you get reviews, in essence, over<br />
the transom, they're either justifying, "This was really wonderful.<br />
I made a great decision buying this particular product," or "I hate<br />
it." It's hard to know whether the review was really objective and<br />
realistic.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you ever push-back from advertisers?<br />
<br />
David: All the time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Can you tell me?<br />
<br />
Betsy: We would feel the pushback from our ad sales people. They would say<br />
"So and so is annoyed with you because you didn't put it." We very<br />
rarely put anybody's totally negative reviews, but we tried to be<br />
objective, and not every product is perfect. Almost every product<br />
is going to have some negative feature.<br />
We would put those in and the advertisers would then go to their ad<br />
rep and complain. Then the ad rep would come to us and say, "Why<br />
are you doing this? These people are mad. I have to sell them ads."<br />
We would just say "Separation of church and State. You are<br />
advertising in this magazine because it's a credible magazine, and<br />
if we let you push us around, it won't be credible anymore, and<br />
then it will reflect on your ad."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you remember anyone ever pulling ads [inaudible 00:58:39] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't, offhand. Do you?<br />
<br />
David: No, but I can tell you the opposite. There were a couple of<br />
magazines that almost ran manufactured press releases as product<br />
reviews. They did get more advertising than we did from some<br />
manufacturers that liked that. I hate to name names, but Compute<br />
Magazine. I don't think you'll find any negative reviews in Compute<br />
Magazine. Everything was the greatest thing since sliced bread.<br />
Personal Computing, similar, very positive. "Gee whiz" reviews on<br />
almost all the things that they saw. It just isn't that way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You have talked about [inaudible 00:59:49] . We've talked briefly<br />
at least about the other magazines. Sync, the one about Timex<br />
Sinclair. I understand the allure of publishing a magazine geared<br />
to a specific system, but why did you pick Timex Sinclair? [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Probably two reasons. One is that we had more of a presence in<br />
England than most of the other magazines.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Still do.<br />
<br />
David: We had a very early agreement with David Tebbet, who was the co-<br />
publisher of Personal Computer, something-or-other. It might have<br />
been Personal Computer World. Yes, it was.<br />
<br />
Betsy Ahi: Yes it was Personal Computer World, and when PC world started they<br />
had to call it PC World because there was already a Personal<br />
Computer World in England.<br />
<br />
David: And we had an agreement that they would reprint materials from<br />
Creative Computing, which they did for a while but then they<br />
developed their own in-house capabilities and there was enough<br />
differences. We went to England and very early on had an agent in<br />
England that we could take subscriptions.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A housewife who kept her dark issues in her spare bathroom.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we still know her. Hazel Greaves, Hazy. Anyway, so we were<br />
getting enough subscriptions from England. We were sending over, I<br />
don't know how they packaged them up, but they call them Mbags, M-<br />
bags, mail bags basically of magazines, then we mail them from<br />
England. So I had more of our connection with British market than<br />
probably any of the other magazines, we definitely did.<br />
And so I get to know Clarkson Clair and what's going on over there.<br />
And then when they bring over the computer to this country and<br />
Timex, my God, big outfit. They were going to market it. By that<br />
time you know, there was no point starting a [inaudible 01:02:25]<br />
magazine or an entire magazine. They were, Or Apple, they were<br />
already existed. So maybe this is going to be the next big one. We<br />
will be right there when they start and we were.<br />
<br />
Timex actually put, what we had simple, simple sink or something<br />
but it was in the package with the computer. So that was one way of<br />
getting our subscriber base and we couldn't possibly afford to<br />
advertise and do direct mailings for magazine like that. But they<br />
were in essence helping us go on. So that's why it is pretty<br />
successful actually. Often, we were making money on the magazine<br />
mainly because we didn't have to promote it.<br />
<br />
If we had to get subscriptions, we could not have possibly made it<br />
work. There wasn't enough advertising really. I don't know what the<br />
issue here was, but it was not as good as we would have liked it.<br />
The magazine would have been tiny if we maintained the same<br />
advertising to edit ratio we would have liked. But we didn't lose<br />
money out of it but we didn't make anything out of it either. I<br />
think it was a breakeven proposition.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Microsystems. [inaudible 01:04:09] .<br />
<br />
David: I said there was a lot of early development in New Jersey and there<br />
was a guy named Saul Libes, you will find him probably, [laughs]<br />
who was the first president of the Armature Computer Group in New<br />
Jersey. He was a Professor at [inaudible 01:04:43] College and he<br />
felt that Byte magazine started out fine but then they were<br />
focusing more on assembled hardware and things that were already<br />
made.<br />
So he wanted to get down on really lower level of do it yourself,<br />
build it yourself. Microsystems was more like Byte was in the very<br />
beginning, focusing on circuit diagram, this was logic in PC's and<br />
everything.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There first name was S100, Microsystems<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, S100 perhaps then it became Microsystems in '78 or '79. When<br />
some of the others came out they started [inaudible 01:05:45] 6800<br />
and 68,000 chips from Motorola. But I would say it was a really<br />
techy magazine and it was one that I think probably killed that one<br />
off.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was dead before [inaudible 01:06:05] . [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: It might have been. I don't know, but it was...<br />
<br />
Betsy: S100 bus did not survive and to the [inaudible 01:06:12] .<br />
<br />
David: It was dead before as there was these eras and the do it yourself<br />
S100 era,that was '75 to '78. Then it kind of had a downward spiral<br />
of two or three years and it was gone. Well, maybe it wasn't gone<br />
but it wasn't the same. And so Microsystems was tuned into that and<br />
they were running hardcore stuff.<br />
And the reason that Saul...we reach an agreement with him to<br />
publish it, is basically he didn't have any real magazine<br />
background. We thought we could do something with it. It turned out<br />
not to be a good fit bit we published it for a while. I don't know<br />
if we made money or lost money on that. Probably it didn't make<br />
anything. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Small business computers or computing.<br />
<br />
David: What?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Small business computers? Who do we buy that from? I can't even<br />
remember. You can't even remember that we had it, I can tell by the<br />
look on your face<br />
<br />
David: I can<br />
<br />
Betsy: That one of my brothers...my brother was a publisher remember?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I don't know who or where we got it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That just fall into grave or...?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Eventually, but that we post it for a while. I think is something<br />
that somebody basically left on our door step.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think it was kind of like a puppy on the... [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: I think it came with your brother.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, because my brother wasn't into publishing until after clearing<br />
college.<br />
<br />
David: It sounded like a good idea at the time.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think we saw a future in business computing<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we did and unfortunately that was one word as if they just<br />
want...I mentioned yesterday that they wanted to really shift the<br />
focus of Creative Computing away from home and broaden out and<br />
shifted into the small business market. And just did not, it was an<br />
uncomfortable fit. We would've been better to have a separate<br />
magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember where we got Small Business Computing from or<br />
where it went.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know, either.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But I know that obviously it wasn't a huge acquisition.<br />
<br />
David: It was a footnote.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A footnote in the story. [laughs]<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Actually, a bigger acquisition was earlier and that was Rom<br />
Magazine. Rom was published by who?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Erik Sandberg-Diment.<br />
<br />
David: Right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: D-I-M-E-N-T.<br />
<br />
David: Connecticut. He did a nice job with the magazine, very nice job<br />
with it. Published nine issues and a little different focus than<br />
Creative but it really overlapped us very nicely. He had more<br />
graphic stuff. In fact, it was through him that I got to know<br />
George Baker and some of the people up there. The other guy that<br />
did the pixelated blocks photos. You've seen those.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The Einstein.<br />
<br />
David: [crosstalk] The Lincoln with block pics.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Block pics.<br />
<br />
David: Block pics. OK, he and George Baker sort of came as a package with<br />
Rom, they knew of each other. We actually, I would say, four or<br />
five issues, ran Rom as a whole separate section and even set it on<br />
the cover of Creative Computing and Rom. Then it became evident...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think that was because he had a whole other editorial kicking<br />
around. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We bought.<br />
<br />
David: Could be. And then we would just merge it in completely, but that<br />
was a very good fit. It brought us more editorial than it did<br />
subscribers. They did not have a big subscriber base, but it was a<br />
nice marriage in a sense.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Video and Arcade Games only published I think four issues.<br />
<br />
David: Three.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Three?<br />
<br />
David: Actually, three but if you've got a hold of the third one, you're<br />
doing well. I think Ziff cut that off after two real issues got<br />
mailed out. We did a third one but it wasn't sent out to<br />
subscribers.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My website only has two issues.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. There were only two that really were distributed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So I have...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: A goal. [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, if you can get a hold of the third one. [laughter] I don't<br />
even have that. There's a same thing on Tarry-on. There were three<br />
issues of Tarry-on that I did not keep the third issue. Oh, man.<br />
Shoot me.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: But Video and Arcade Games, there were at least five or six other<br />
magazines focusing on that. Talk about magazines that were running<br />
non-objective manufacture-provided reviews, all the others were. I,<br />
maybe, convinced myself and some people at Davis that there was a<br />
need for really objective...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ziff? Did Ziff do that?<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Were we with Ziff when we did that?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah. That was a late one. So we said, let's...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Continue it through.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, that was definitely. Let's do it. But again...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not only that but it was going to be fun.<br />
<br />
David: It was going to be a lot of fun. [laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: So why did it fail?<br />
<br />
David: OK, again you got to look at the eras and what was happening.<br />
Arcade games then really were on the decline. Video arcades where<br />
you go in and pop a quarter in, because there was so much more<br />
capability in the home computers and the [inaudible 01:12:55] and<br />
the Mattel and the different home systems. They could do all now,<br />
not as much, but you get a pretty darned good game that you could<br />
take home with you and not have to pop a quarter in the slot every<br />
time you play.<br />
So arcade games were kind of on the downward spiral, so that<br />
eliminated a lot of potential advertising. We weren't going to get<br />
any advertising from Nameco and all of the producers of the arcade<br />
games, which was, "Hey, it is advertising along with..." And the<br />
other home producers of the game, there were four or five magazines<br />
already that they were pouring money into. They didn't really want<br />
another one.<br />
<br />
So it was advertising that or just lack of advertising that killed<br />
that off. We just couldn't get it. I think there was still a need<br />
for what we had sort of in a sense proposed to do of objectively<br />
reviewing games and secondly, we're telling people how to play<br />
them.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, it was strategies.<br />
<br />
David: Strategies. It was advertising that we just didn't have, couldn't<br />
get.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:14:28] Atari explored and Atari I think we've covered<br />
pretty well.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Military vehicles, which we talked about.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] Yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So the other magazines, Byte and [inaudible 01:14:45] , was it<br />
rivalry? Was it friendly competition?<br />
<br />
David: Byte, we were in bed together. Not in bed together, but we<br />
published the best of Byte. Creative Computing did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: For awhile.<br />
<br />
David: Well, just one.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. That wasn't that friendly a rivalry. It wasn't that friendly<br />
after awhile.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't friendly once they sold to McGraw Hill, and they sold<br />
early. Then everything was off. We did some joint promotions with<br />
Byte for hardware creative software. We ran the ads for each other<br />
for a short time.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's when McGraw Hill cutoff.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] In a heartbeat. No more of that.<br />
<br />
David: We felt that basically we weren't even competing for the same<br />
advertisers. Just a few, but not really. Certainly, we were not in<br />
direct competition at all with Byte. So that was just kind of all<br />
in the same place and you're going in a hardware direction, we're<br />
going on the software.<br />
When Wayne Green threw this intrigue with his wife and everything<br />
else, lost Byte Magazine. He was fit to be tied. "I'm going to kill<br />
them!" and he started Kilobyte. It wasn't killable. It was Kilobyte<br />
for I don't know how many issues.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not many.<br />
<br />
David: 1000 bytes. [laughter] and a kilobyte, it had a dual meaning there.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: That was a ferocious and very nasty. Oh, horrible rivalry. Somebody<br />
early on forced him not to use the name byte at all.<br />
<br />
Betsy: So it was byte.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: So they changed it to Kilobaud.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Which didn't mean anything.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: No.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So did you have a relationship with Wayne?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Nobody had a relationship with... [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Nobody really had a relationship. I knew him, of course. He was<br />
going his own way. Now the one area actually where we got into more<br />
competition with him than in the magazine itself, because again, he<br />
was trying to be like Byte, hardware oriented and he published 73<br />
magazines so he was basically focusing on the ham radio people, the<br />
do it yourselfers and so on. But they started a software division.<br />
It was pretty good. They had a lot of the same types of software<br />
that we did on cassette tape.<br />
In any event, we really had more of a head to head rivalry on the<br />
software than in the magazine publishing. We never really had<br />
anything to do with the magazine products or books. They also<br />
published some books but more like the magazine hardware type of<br />
thing. We weren't quite as selective, but our book publishing we<br />
did get into things that weren't in the magazine. We published<br />
books with more of a hardware orientation. We had a little broader<br />
line of books than the type of things that we had in the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I don't know if you want to open this can of worms, but you said to<br />
me in an email, "You couldn't find two people whose vision,<br />
philosophy, ethics, and view of business and life was further apart<br />
than Wayne and I." Can you elaborate on that? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was just basically unpleasant, is my take on him. I didn't know<br />
him that well but it was just sort of like he had a chip on his<br />
shoulder and was daring you to knock it off. Wouldn't you say?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You knew him before I did but by the time I arrived on the scene<br />
that was just sort of the general industry perception of him, I<br />
think. It was just stay away from him, leave him alone, he's not<br />
very nice.<br />
<br />
David: Well, one other thing, which we sort of touched on a couple of<br />
times, I'm very trusting. [laughter] Overly so, according to my ex-<br />
wife and I think there would be a couple of examples. Wayne would<br />
walk out of that door, boy, out of sight, 'you're going to do<br />
something to screw him' is what his view would be. He did not trust<br />
anybody.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] And least of all, his ex wife.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: It's the old saying, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean<br />
that somebody isn't out to get you." He thought everyone was out to<br />
get him, everybody. So we were totally philosophically different.<br />
Our ways of doing business were different. I shake hands with you,<br />
we have an agreement. You don't shake hands with Wayne.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't think his employees were ever happy either.<br />
<br />
David: Oh!<br />
<br />
Betsy: You talked to them and it shows. He didn't have like a great...<br />
<br />
David: Rapport.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well it was not. The culture of his organization I don't think was<br />
particularly, I think it was probably permeated with this lack of<br />
trust.<br />
<br />
David: Well, one thing, we had fun. We really did have fun at Creative<br />
Computing. Perhaps some of the editorial staff, too much. There was<br />
one point where Betsy had to away their...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well they were all young guys. Some of them even still in high<br />
school, they would play games for hours and hours and hours, long<br />
after the reviews were done. It was one, self-contained thing that<br />
played football, and they played it for hours. I had to take it<br />
away from them. Like "don't make me be your mother"<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there any drug culture at all? If you read [inaudible 01:22:17]<br />
and he was cocaine and high everyday and popped...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not that we knew of. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: The East coast was quite different.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No there was nothing, really. I don't think so. In fact, my client<br />
John Anderson and Peter Fee, they were actually kind of protective<br />
of me in a lot of ways. I can remember being in John's office and<br />
they were talking about a movie or something like that. John said,<br />
"No, you wouldn't like this movie, don't go to this movie." That<br />
kind of thing, they were funny guys. They just kept laughing. David<br />
Lubar. They were free spirits but they were very funny, talented<br />
guys.<br />
<br />
David: He is coming out with a line of children's books, weird, weird<br />
stuff. The last one, something about the lawn mower weenies. He has<br />
a line of 6 or 8, and they're all little short stories. Some of<br />
them were adaptations of stuff that almost got published in<br />
Creative Computing, probably some of them did. Lubar is a funny<br />
guy. When he left and went to work for one of the video gaming<br />
companies, his first big successful game was "Worm Wars." You were<br />
like, "Worm Wars?" [laughs]<br />
Other people are fighting real serious warrior and you are fighting<br />
with worms. We just had a different kind of culture, a lot of fun.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Jonny Anderson went to work for A plus in San Francisco. He was one<br />
of the five people killed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1986.<br />
He was in a car and a piece of the building fell on the car. He was<br />
a really funny guy.<br />
<br />
David: We did not have a serious business culture.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, we had this great big room with a bunch of tables set up around<br />
the edges, in the middle. It was kind of like that, nowhere near as<br />
neat.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I will clean that up for you.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] Just tangles of wires, and we had to have one of every<br />
kind of computer so we can test all the software, and this one<br />
would be running this kind of peripheral, and it was like a young<br />
guys dream job.<br />
<br />
David: You commented yesterday about how we had a bunch of high school,<br />
not quite, but still...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I said that they were in their early 20s but they basically had the<br />
maturity of high school students, they needed a little bit of<br />
mothering. But I wasn't that myself. They were just really nice<br />
guys, we did a good job hiring those kids.<br />
<br />
David: When you talk about the Atari cultures and some of the others,<br />
where every Friday some of these companies have parties, that kind<br />
of thing. We had an annual party, a picnic. We didn't need weekly<br />
parties and stuff to let you have fun because that stuff was going<br />
on every day, not really partying but playing the games and<br />
bantering and everything else.<br />
As they say, at Washington, a real efficient business culture.<br />
Heck, I didn't work for Digital Equipment, which was still a pretty<br />
relaxed place, but AT&T which was anything but. This is as far away<br />
from that kind of corporate culture as you can get, but it worked.<br />
Didn't make a lot of money, but it worked.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:26:58]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. And I think they appreciated it because they weren't making<br />
tons of money either, but they were having a lot of fun. They<br />
enjoyed going to work, they really enjoyed it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Speaking of Kindle, I've done it but haven't told anybody yet that<br />
best of Creative Computing too is now available on Kindle. And I<br />
have been working backwards. [crosstalk] I just had it on sale.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I haven't publicized it yet for sale.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They won't let you do. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah, I think they will have two.<br />
<br />
David: Did you do that through Amazon? How do you convert is to Kindle?<br />
I scan them and then I do CRM and I use Elance or utilize some<br />
service in India that converts it back to ASCII, and then they<br />
convert it into an E-book from there. It's a lot of work, I want it<br />
done well, and I want it to be super awesome. And they just<br />
[inaudible 01:28:40] , like we were talking about before.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Outsourcing and stuff. But I can do it myself but that would take<br />
way too long. So I just try to do the quality control [inaudible<br />
01:28:49] . It's not perfect but better than nothing.<br />
<br />
David: I have reached the point where with my Dodge restoration book, that<br />
yes, many of the borders around the pictures are terrible, they're<br />
hand drawn and so on. But I'm not going to bother to re-do that, I<br />
just want take the book, get it into some sort of machine readable<br />
format, PDF or something. [inaudible 01:29:24] somebody that can...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah, I can get you off with that. We can then figure it out.<br />
<br />
David: I found one extra one that I can cut up.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That will help a lot. [inaudible 01:29:37] . If you want to sell a<br />
PDF of it, that would be up in couple of day. That's easy, but a<br />
searchable Kindle version that takes longer.<br />
<br />
David: I don't want a Kindle version because people want to print out<br />
something that they can...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Take out to the garage<br />
<br />
David: When people slide under the vehicle they have it there, "Oh, OK<br />
this is what I should be looking for."<br />
<br />
Kevin: If you scan it and upload it to Amazon, even create space from<br />
[inaudible 01:30:06] company, then there could actually be another<br />
book, that looks pretty identical to the first one. We will figure<br />
out.<br />
Do you [inaudible 01:30:23] ? But are you familiar with...?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Are there any?<br />
<br />
Kevin: There are but they are very different than Creative.<br />
<br />
David: Somebody out there said, "What did you read today?" The only<br />
magazines that I will occasionally pick up in the computer field<br />
are mostly from England, Internet magazines, well there are<br />
several, which is sort of interesting that the dominant Internet<br />
magazines come from England, but they do.<br />
If I want to do something, and I haven't lately, but I wanted to<br />
get into doing something different or interactive or something with<br />
my website. I'd pick up one of those magazines and kind of have<br />
same kind of thing that Creative used to publish. Here is a code to<br />
do it in Pearl or HTML, whatever.<br />
<br />
I converted all of my website, quite a while ago, to XHTML from old<br />
HTML. I did not like any of the programs that generate web pages,<br />
mainly because...Well, today its probably OK, but I felt that<br />
earlier on, they were very inefficient. You'd have this much code<br />
for something and XHTML would write it in five lines.<br />
<br />
My old-fashioned [inaudible 01:32:23] said, "You know what, the<br />
interpreter or compiler or whatever, has to go through a lot of<br />
that just to pick out what is going to be displayed." My web pages<br />
are very compact and short. They are all XHTML, none of that is<br />
extra [inaudible 01:32:41] style pages and everything else.<br />
<br />
Anyway, so that's what I'll pick up a magazine for. I'm was doing a<br />
little bit of programming in Pearl and then I said, "No. You know<br />
what, I can get routines that I can download and I don't have to<br />
learn it myself. I learned enough to know that I don't want your<br />
Pearl program." [laughs] Or what is the other one? I don't know.<br />
I'm right at the point now where I'm wanting to do some more things<br />
that I can't, so I'll probably purchase some more computer<br />
magazines and learn about it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Has anyone talked to you about the purchase of PC by Davis?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is a big story.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: She was involved.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was involved. There was a magazine called PC. I was in San<br />
Francisco.<br />
<br />
Kevin: PC magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: PC Magazine, right. And, there was a guy named Tony Gold and there<br />
was somebody else that I can't remember. There was Tony Gold and<br />
this Mr. X started this magazine and they hired...David Banell will<br />
probably tell you all, I don't know all the details but I'm sure he<br />
has it engraved in his brain.<br />
They hired David Banell to run it and I guess several other people,<br />
and my understanding is, that they told them they were going to<br />
give them a piece of the action, they weren't going to pay them<br />
very much but you're all part owners and everything, but nobody<br />
ever wrote it down.<br />
<br />
So when Ziff Davis approached Tony Gold and Mr. X and wanted to buy<br />
the magazine, and the guys said, "Oh yeah, sure," and they sold it<br />
to him and all these people that were working for them said, "Well,<br />
what about us. We're part owners too." But there was no proof of<br />
it. So Ziff bought it, and they were right in the middle, just<br />
about to go to press with an issue and they got word that it had<br />
been purchased by Ziff.<br />
<br />
So David Banell took just about the entire staff and they walked<br />
out and went across town and started PC World. Apparently their<br />
lawyers said, "Don't take anything with you." So they just walked<br />
out and left the offices as they were, and Ziff, who now had a<br />
magazine to get out and no one to do it, sent me out to San<br />
Francisco for a couple of weeks and there was like an editorial<br />
assistant and a couple of freelance writers, were the only people<br />
left.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So this is when you became the interim.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is how I become the editorial director of PC. So I basically<br />
went out there and walked into this office and had to pull together<br />
their issue and get it off to the printer. They had a big dummy on<br />
the wall where everthing...<br />
<br />
Kevin: They lay all the...<br />
<br />
Betsy: They lay all the impositions where all the pages and the stories<br />
were going to go and they moved everything around. [laughs] But<br />
they couldn't resist.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That is awesome.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This one guy, whose name I wish I could remember. Barry Owen,<br />
worked with me, and we were able to get it off to the printer and<br />
then pack everything up and send it back to New York and then they<br />
hired Barry Owen, he moved to New York and he eventually become the<br />
editor, because that was who they had.<br />
I was sort of the editorial director for a while and they said<br />
that, "If you were going to do this, you would have to come to the<br />
city. We are going to really set up an office here and make it<br />
real." And I said, "No, I am not going to drive into the city every<br />
day or take the train or the bus or anything." It was a interesting<br />
story and we were getting much more interesting version of it from<br />
David Barnell, who was there. [laughs]<br />
<br />
And in the mean time, they were all starting up PC World and taking<br />
all of their freelancers and trying to make it as difficult as<br />
possible for PC. That was a big rivalry, obviously.<br />
<br />
David: And then it created a couple of months of problems at creative too,<br />
because my editor was gone. I had really gotten very dependent to<br />
rely on her for so many things. "I got to edit this myself." And<br />
then the whole question mark was, OK if PC magazine, is she can<br />
stay with it. It was a time of uncertainty.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm sure it was a bad career move.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. But PC magazine still exist.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, exactly. I don't know if I would have existed if I had to<br />
commute to New York, that's a nasty commute. Millions of people do<br />
it but, I just didn't want to be one of them. I didn't mean to<br />
interrupt, so back to you.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What are you most proud of, or everything you have done?<br />
<br />
David: OK, that's obviously not a one word answer. Proud is, I am not<br />
crazy about it. I guess the fact that I continued to hear from<br />
people that said, "Hey, I got my start in computing from Basic<br />
computer games or Creative Computing," or something that I had my<br />
hand in, that makes me feel pretty good.<br />
You have a long term, or longer term influence that just what you<br />
do at the time, it's living on. It's not living on forever. Basic<br />
isn't going to live on forever. But I think the idea that having<br />
some positive influence on other people, on their lives, on their<br />
careers, that's a good.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You helped send people into the computer science field.<br />
<br />
David: And you know the specific individual accomplishments. Yeah, I wrote<br />
a couple of programs that are probably in some cases, maybe not the<br />
program but the routines, are still in use. That's minor compared<br />
to having an influence on people and their career and their<br />
outlook, their future. That's way more important. "OK so I wrote a<br />
great algorithm, so what."<br />
<br />
Kevin: And you really think it's the same algorithm that's being used in<br />
Google maps and...<br />
<br />
David: Portions of it, yeah. But that is minor. I look back and I say,<br />
"Almost anything that I wrote in the last 30-40 years, if I were<br />
doing it today, I would have done it a little differently, but I<br />
didn't know then what I know now." So there's no one thing I could<br />
say, "Oh, that was a really great article, or great insight," or<br />
something. Anything can be improved upon.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sure. That's what disappoints me about computer magazines today is<br />
I don't think that it seems like children going to be able to go.<br />
It's not going to motivate anybody to do anything, other than use<br />
Word version 18 or whatever. There's no Basic programs to type<br />
anymore and it's not exciting.<br />
[cross talk]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Well, [inaudible 01:42:31] was mentioning that at breakfast,<br />
oh gosh that was just yesterday.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was yesterday [laughs] .<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] That kids today don't have any feeling about, or I should<br />
say knowledge about the real basics of bits. What is a bit?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: Nobody knows anymore. He wanted to find some little simple piece of<br />
hardware. Really, I guess he has, that every kid when they're in<br />
the 5th or 6th grade will be exposed to this so they'll have some<br />
concept of what bits are all about. Are you ever going to get that<br />
into schools today? No. So anyway, it's just kind of, hopefully<br />
there's been some long term influence.<br />
And what I'm doing now even, which is mainly developing bible<br />
studies for...well, I mostly have guys that have had a drug or<br />
alcohol addiction problem coming to this. They're in a rescue<br />
mission. I'm hoping that these studies can have a little bit of an<br />
influence on the direction of their lives. They're a positive<br />
influence on where they go from here. So it's kind of, people more<br />
than a specific thing or whatever.<br />
<br />
[pause]<br />
<br />
Those are terrible copies.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They are copies. These are from the scans. I was printing scans and<br />
I wasn't trying to make them pretty. Just for my reasons, it was<br />
quick and dirty. I could've bumped the contrast and stuff.<br />
<br />
David: There's Carl.<br />
[pause]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do have anything left, like how many subscribers you had over time?<br />
Is that data around anymore? How many newsstand copies you had? I<br />
assume that is a lot.<br />
<br />
David: OK, maximum, I think we mentioned that. We hit just about a half a<br />
million before Ziff killed it. Then, they gave people a choice of<br />
three magazines that they expected to continue to publish, PC,<br />
Apple's A+, or Mac User.<br />
I'm guessing that most people went with PC. One of the reasons<br />
actually was Ziff's rationale at that point was, PC World had<br />
really grown a lot and the circulation base of PC World and PC were<br />
very close. They were both about a half million. PC might have had<br />
a small lead.<br />
<br />
Then, by killing Creative Computing and rolling all of those<br />
subscribers, there was some overlap. Certainly, there were some<br />
subscribers that got both magazines. You probably had a quarter of<br />
a million additional subscribers into PC. All of the sudden, they<br />
go to advertise, "We've got three-quarters of a million and PC<br />
World only has half a million."<br />
<br />
That was when PC had a huge growth spurt. You know, they started<br />
publishing those telephone-book-thick issues.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I would think that it probably still holds the record for the<br />
largest magazine ever published, whenever the issue was that they<br />
published it, it was their biggest one. Certainly magazines aren't<br />
getting bigger now. They didn't continue to increase in size after<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: Then they started publishing it twice a month. The nudge that the<br />
subscriber base at Creative, gave to PC really, separated them<br />
completely from PC World. They had their reasons.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. This is a chart of the page count of Creative Computing over<br />
its life. It's not a question, I just made a chart. Every December<br />
there's a peak for the big December issue. Right at the end it<br />
just, all of the sudden, stopped.<br />
<br />
David: Well, that's when Ziff had decided to kill it, which was almost a<br />
year before. They basically let us publish for another eight or<br />
nine months after they had made the decision.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was a lot of back and forth. Are they going to kill it? Are<br />
they not going to kill it?<br />
<br />
David: They weren't promoting, no subscription promotion. They were saving<br />
their money. If you don't promote the subscriptions, you're not<br />
going to get them.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is page count.<br />
<br />
David: It was advertising.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:48:59]<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't actually subscriber base didn't drop them. That's cool.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just thought I'd do a comparison, even though that's not really<br />
what I'm doing here. In the beginning, you guys were bimonthly and<br />
they were monthly. I couldn't know how to do it accurately. Their<br />
page count's actually higher, because they were doing twice as<br />
much. I don't have all the data here. You guys tended to publish<br />
larger issues than "Kilobyte?"<br />
<br />
David: It was so dependent upon advertising. You got some magazines, they<br />
would run 80, 90 percent advertising, if they could. In some<br />
special interest fields, you can get away with that, because people<br />
are actually buying the magazine for the advertising, not for the<br />
editorial content.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [inaudible 01:50:02] , a good example.<br />
<br />
David: That's exactly right. Even what the guys that bought Military<br />
Vehicles, they just went over so heavily to...I always believe that<br />
you should have at least one-third editorial content, preferably<br />
more. They dropped down to 20 percent to edit.<br />
<br />
Kevin: There was one issue, the 10th anniversary issue, I don't mean to be<br />
picking on Wayne here. There was this quote he happened to say,<br />
which I thought was really interesting to me, I wanted to get your<br />
take on it. He said, this is in 1984, "A computer system doesn't<br />
really stand a prayer anymore unless there's at least one<br />
dedicated, independent magazine for its users."<br />
<br />
David: Wayne said that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wayne said that. Is that true? At the time, would you have agreed<br />
with that?<br />
<br />
David: In '84? Again, you've got to look at where we were in the cycle at<br />
that point. The cycle was then, there were more computers dying off<br />
than there were new ones being released. Standardization had come<br />
in really. You've got the IBM PC, and everybody's producing a PC<br />
clone. Apple kept going, and Atari, and Commodore attempted to.<br />
If you were to start a computer company at that point, with a new<br />
computer, yeah, you'd need something to give your user base<br />
something to do with it, more than just what the manufacturer was<br />
selling. So, that's probably accurate. What do you think?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, I think it's accurate. That's what people started to expect.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. Another chord of the same issue which we've kind of touched<br />
on from Tom Dwyer. This is in 1984. He's saying, "Computer<br />
magazines used to have personality [laughter] and now they don't."<br />
Now, they really don't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They really don't!<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think they still have personality in form but now it's just<br />
inconsistent.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Who was Tom Dwyer? I don't remember him.<br />
<br />
David: Tom Dwyer? He was at University of Pittsburgh. He came up with all<br />
those neat applications. He and Margo...He had the best basic<br />
primer of anybody, in fact the only one that both Kemeny and Kurtz<br />
endorsed outside of their own material. He had really written some<br />
good Basic books.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm just finishing up here. The Internet says you were born in<br />
1939. Is that right?<br />
<br />
David: Yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Where were you born?<br />
<br />
David: New York, New York.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent.<br />
<br />
David: I was born in the hospital that my father had a hand in designing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Really?<br />
<br />
David: He was an architect up until the Recession. I think he, perhaps,<br />
designed the restrooms but he wasn't the...<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: When were you two married?<br />
<br />
Betsy: 1988. 25 years ago.<br />
<br />
David: June 18, 1988.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What's your last name now?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mine?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ahl.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I tried keeping this professional thing and it was just way too<br />
confusing, since that really wasn't my name anyway. That was my<br />
first husband's name, and then just...this is way too complicated.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My wife kept her maiden name and now she wishes she hadn't. It's<br />
just confusing. It just made sense to do.<br />
<br />
Betsy: If had been my maiden name, I might have, but it really wasn't.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What haven't I asked you that I should have?<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] We kind of were noodling it around last night and said,<br />
"Man, the guy's thorough."<br />
<br />
Betsy: You the most prepared interviewer ever.<br />
<br />
David: I jotted down a couple of notes. Nope.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Got everything?<br />
<br />
David: What's your thinking? Because originally you were talking to me<br />
about covering Wayne's magazines and so on.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My original thought, when I had put no thought into it, was that it<br />
would be half about Wayne's magazine and half about Creative. First<br />
of all, after talking to him, I thought there's not enough to do<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: Did you talk to Wayne?<br />
<br />
Kevin: I talked to Wayne.<br />
<br />
David: Well that's good to know, right? Carl Helmers didn't know if Wayne<br />
was still alive.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He's still alive.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's true. We asked Carl Helmers if Wayne was still alive and he<br />
was [inaudible 01:56:06] .<br />
<br />
David: Actually, there was another guy up there that published a computer<br />
magazine. What the heck was the name of it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Who are you talking about?<br />
<br />
David: Up in New Hampshire, Peterborough. It was one of the earlier would-<br />
be competitors to Datamation. So, it was much earlier.<br />
He was absolutely totally convinced about the Kennedy assassination<br />
and published a computer analysis of all the photos and everything<br />
else. Every single issue of the magazine had this stuff. He and<br />
Wayne were on the same wavelength on that. You ask Wayne about the<br />
conspiracy. [laughs] You'll get an earful.<br />
<br />
Kevin: In answer to your question. First, it was going to be the two, and<br />
then that happened. Also my wife said, "If you're doing two, then<br />
it's going to seem like a compare and contrast thing." That's not<br />
what I want to do.<br />
Now I'm thinking that this will be a project about the earliest<br />
computer magazines, the first computer magazines. That way, I can,<br />
whatever, four or five chapters. One on Creative, and maybe Byte.<br />
I'm meeting with the editor of Byte in a couple of weeks at an<br />
event, maybe Interface Age or one of the other ones.<br />
<br />
David: If you can find Bob Jones, that would be an interesting contrast.<br />
He was Interface Age. He had a different perspective on a lot of<br />
things, and I had a lot of respect for him. He just didn't sell at<br />
the right time. Too bad. Bob Jones was a very serious, good guy.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Who were the other early people? Dr. Dobbs? I don't know what...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, Dr. Dobbs...<br />
<br />
David: Jim Warren! Oh my goodness. That would give you another perspective<br />
altogether.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's, again, the California...<br />
<br />
David: Jim Warren and Bob Albrecht are tied together very closely. They're<br />
both in sort of in the alternative lifestyle. I don't know what<br />
you'd call it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That probably had Friday afternoon pot parties. [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Oh, boy. Did they ever! Yes, yes. Jim also was the one that started<br />
the West Coast computer fairs. He's a very capable guy. Dr. Dobb's<br />
journal was in a sense, well, you've probably seen it. You have,<br />
right? OK, so you know.<br />
That's really low level programming rather than higher languages.<br />
We're talking about machine languages, assembly language,<br />
programming, and there. It was sort of like Microsystems was to<br />
Byte. Microsystems, for the really serious hardware guy. Dr. Dobbs<br />
was for the really serious programmer, compared to Creative which<br />
was for people who just wanted to type something in that would<br />
work.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:59:35] basic right. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Dr. Dobbs. That was a totally different [inaudible 01:59:43]<br />
competitor.<br />
<br />
David: We didn't compete at all. I had a view that we competed at all with<br />
them; they may have thought we did but I didn't think so.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did they even have advertising?<br />
<br />
David: Oh yeah, actually they did, and it kept going for a long time<br />
because it was a small little nitch magazine. But, yeah, Jim Warren<br />
would be an interesting guy, very interesting guy early on. I don't<br />
know about Albert because you say he published more tabloid<br />
newspapers. I don't know if they ever really published any magazine<br />
size thing or not. Probably not, but it would give me a totally<br />
different perspective because they are coming from the west coast,<br />
looser or whatever.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That sounded pretty loose.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah nothing compared to that.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think he was sort of in rebellion when he started working at<br />
Creator Computing because he was coming off of AT&T where he had to<br />
wear a suit to work every day. So the first thing he did was burn<br />
his suits and wear t-shirt and jeans way before anybody was doing<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: I went extremely in the other direction, yeah I did, but who else<br />
real early. Personal computing which I think David Barnell somehow<br />
involved in it at some point in there. Because they moved from the<br />
west coast to New Jersey, they were bought by...who was that? It<br />
was mostly a company that published things like hardware age and<br />
advertiser-driven magazines. What was the name?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, gosh. Begins with an 'H'.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Halshep<br />
<br />
David: No. Anyway, when they brought personal computing...I think Barnell<br />
maybe even started it, and then they moved it to New Jersey, and<br />
then David said "I'm not going to New Jersey. I'm a west coast<br />
guy," or whatever. And then, they changed the whole thing totally.<br />
That's why I said they're one of the ones where they were so<br />
totally advertiser driven. A press release is a product review, as<br />
far as they were concerned.<br />
They had some interesting stuff. They were a competitor only in<br />
name, but also because they got the advertising. "I think I'm going<br />
to advertise." "Oh! We're going to publish a wonderful review! Give<br />
it to us." And so they were early, and they made money. There were<br />
a bunch of flash-in-the-pan magazines that lasted 2 or 3 or maybe 6<br />
issues, but nobody...<br />
<br />
Kevin: But only one in seven made it, so...<br />
<br />
Betsy: One in seven, right?<br />
<br />
David: That's right, exactly. I can't remember the name of some of these<br />
ones, but there was a very successful big magazine that published<br />
all Apple...reviews of Apple stuff. What was that one? Apple by<br />
themselves spawned I'd guess half a dozen magazines.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Inquest, and Insider, and Apple...a bunch of others there.<br />
<br />
David: Right. Actually, there's one that I can't think of the name of, it<br />
turned out, it was bigger and thicker and creative. They were<br />
publishing a lot of stuff, but again, it would all be positive and<br />
so they really killed us on getting advertising. We had been a<br />
publisher of Apple material for a while. Then all these others came<br />
along. That one, whatever it was, was really took a lot of<br />
advertising from us. I'll think about it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You'll remember.<br />
<br />
David: I'll remember some of this. When it all settled out, you came back<br />
down to eight or nine, but the ones we're talking about...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Well, at one point there was 200.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I think that's correct.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You are probably counting newsletters..<br />
<br />
Kevin: Probably industry-specific stuff and niche stuff but still, you<br />
went from one to 200, 10 years ago.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. That's true.</div>Mauryhttps://www.computingpioneers.com/index.php?title=Dave_Ahl_and_Betsy_Ahl&diff=140Dave Ahl and Betsy Ahl2019-09-25T18:18:08Z<p>Maury: sp</p>
<hr />
<div>This is a transcript of an audio interview. This transcript may contain errors - if you're using this material for research, etc. please verify with the original recorded interview.<br />
<br />
Source: ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast<br />
<br />
Source URL: http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-280-david-and-betsy-ahl-creative-computing-magazine<br />
<br />
Interviewer: Kevin Savetz<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm interested in how you guys got together. Was it some sort of<br />
office romance? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It started before then. I was working at Drew University and I was<br />
dating the computer science professor. He invited Dave...he was a<br />
subscriber to Creative Computing. I can remember being at his house<br />
and picking up a copy of this magazine and thinking, "Creative<br />
Computing," and laughing. "What kind of a title is that?"<br />
He invited Dave to come speak to one of his classes. While he was<br />
there, he said, "I should stop by your placement office. We're<br />
starting to expand. I'm looking for some people." Right? Am I<br />
getting this right? I was looking for other opportunities, so I<br />
sent him my resume. Many months later, he hired me.<br />
<br />
David: She still smarts about that.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: I interviewed her in, I don't know, April or so.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You interviewed me on April 17th and you did not hire me until<br />
August 1st. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: A lot was going on that year. That was '78.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was a really long time after that that we got married. We didn't<br />
get married until 10 years later.<br />
<br />
David: Actually, I had hired Betsy as our business manager. That's what I<br />
really needed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Not a wife, then.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not wife then, either.<br />
<br />
David: Not at that point. We had 2 buildings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had one.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, well I was looking for...<br />
<br />
Betsy: My first job was to find another building.<br />
<br />
David: We were expanding like crazy. In fact, one of the reasons that I<br />
didn't hire her sooner, I had just left my day job at AT&T, and was<br />
facing up to, "Oh my gosh, can I afford to take a salary out of<br />
Creative Computing?" Yes, we had expanded a lot, but can I even pay<br />
myself, much less other senior people? I left AT&T in July, and<br />
finally by August it became clear I really have to get this<br />
administration end of things under control.<br />
The editorial was OK. I had enough outside contributors that were<br />
going along with what we were doing in-house that I could continue<br />
with that, but it was the other end of things where we really had<br />
some problems. So then we go to 2 separate facilities. One was a 2<br />
family house on the other side of Morristown, and the other was a<br />
converted greenhouse garage, which is where I started. So, Betsy<br />
was in the greenhouse garage where I had the administration side of<br />
things, and I was at the house and that was the editorial and art<br />
and...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Software.<br />
<br />
David: ...putting the magazine together. Software, right. So she would<br />
come over from her place to my office every day or two just to let<br />
me know what's going on, and we'd get together. But it wasn't until<br />
I don't' remember the date when Betsy was saying, "Well, I'd like<br />
to get into..."<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well I had spent all my summers in college and two thereafter<br />
working at our local newspaper, writing editing and putting the<br />
whole thing together, so I think I more or less just said, "We've<br />
got all these new product announcements that we don't have anybody<br />
to do, why don't I just do them?" So, I started out doing the press<br />
releases and things.<br />
<br />
David: Her newspaper experience was first in high school covering sports.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, I started out covering the unpopular sports as a senior in<br />
high school. Because they didn't want a girl to write about the<br />
important sports. So they let the girl write about the unimportant<br />
sports, which turned out to be the winning sports, at this small<br />
New Jersey high school. That's how I started.<br />
<br />
David: And then at the newspaper, you started by writing obituaries,<br />
right?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well, it's one of the things I did. I always wanted to be a Spanish<br />
teacher. I didn't know anything about this. So, I got this sports-<br />
writing job by way of a babysitting job, I babysat for the<br />
publisher's kids and on the way home one night he said to me, "We<br />
always have a boy from the school who writes about the sports for<br />
the paper, do you know anybody?" and I said, "Well, I know the guy<br />
who did it last year, and if he could do it, I could do it."<br />
So I did that and didn't' think much more of it. Went off to<br />
college, came back over spring break, and ran into the guy in the<br />
grocery store and he said, "Would you like a job working for the<br />
paper this summer?" And I said sure. I had no idea whether he<br />
wanted me to sweep the floors or what, but it was a job so I took<br />
it. It was in the editorial department.<br />
<br />
And I learned from some very serious journalists who had worked for<br />
a very good paper, the Newark Evening News, which was a very<br />
serious paper that probably was too serious and folded, probably in<br />
the mid '60s, but these people were really good journalists and<br />
they taught me a lot.<br />
<br />
I think it was that first year, about halfway through the summer<br />
the publisher was on vacation, the editor was going to go on<br />
vacation when the publisher came back and the publisher, the day he<br />
was supposed to come back had appendicitis, had to have an<br />
appendectomy which back in those days was a much bigger deal than<br />
it is now. The editor said, "Well, I'm leaving." [laughs] And there<br />
I was. I was running this little paper.<br />
<br />
David: So I figured if you can run a newspaper, even though it's just a<br />
summer job, she could do a lot for us. Well, Betsy continued to<br />
handle the administrative things for really quite awhile and, as<br />
she said, probably was initially doing new product releases. Cause<br />
you get just tons of it over the transom and from these smaller<br />
companies...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So you'd like get a press release and then you'd rewrite it, that<br />
sort of things?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well we had a new product section and it was a format, a style for<br />
them, for each one. If they sent a photo, do a photo, a cut line<br />
for it. Basically what I do is let them pile up and then sort<br />
through and figure out which ones were worthy of attention. And<br />
then it was kind of just filler. They ran in one column and when<br />
you came to the end of the magazine whatever you had leftover you<br />
would fill in with these.<br />
<br />
David: And the thing is that the companies that were putting out these<br />
press releases, this was back in the, what '76, '77 or so, tiny<br />
little companies. They had no marketing expertise so they were<br />
sending us, in some cases, not quite handwritten but pretty crude.<br />
So it took some editing and some real work to make them readable.<br />
And then, as Betsy said, you had to guess. OK, which one, this is a<br />
significant product but is this guy going to be able to make this<br />
company go or is it just going to flop? And we tried to be<br />
responsible to the readers. Reporting on things that weren't just a<br />
wonderful great new idea but something that they were going to have<br />
on the market that was going to get some support and everything<br />
else. So anyway. That was a long story of how we got together.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I still don't know how you got together.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We were working in an office about as large as this banquette here<br />
together. Because when we first started working together we didn't<br />
have this other house. So it was the two of us. You had an actual<br />
desk I believe. I had a table that he had made out of particle<br />
board. Yeah it was fancy and I had to put duct tape along it<br />
because the edge was making holes in my clothes.<br />
So we worked in this office back to back, sort of got to know each<br />
other, and became friends, little by little. He said to me, when<br />
you're looking for this building, it would be a good thing if there<br />
was a place for me to live because I'm in the process of getting<br />
separated from my wife. Which it turned out you didn't do right<br />
away but eventually you did. Right?<br />
<br />
David: Well, it was three months later. That was right away in a sense.<br />
What precipitated that was we had a woman that was working in the<br />
mailroom and she got in cahoots with somebody in the accounting<br />
department and they started working a little embezzlement.<br />
<br />
Kevin: This was at the [inaudible 00:13:49] ?<br />
<br />
David: Pardon?<br />
<br />
Betsy: At Creative Computing.<br />
<br />
David: No, at Creative Computing. This was just after Betsy was hired. In<br />
fact, they had it going on before and I mean they were very good at<br />
it. What they did is they set up a bank account in the name of<br />
Creative Computing in the next county. And they would take very<br />
fourth or fifth check and it might be a subscription, it might be<br />
paying for an ad or something...<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was mostly the advertisers.<br />
<br />
David: Well it was both. And then they put that into their bank account.<br />
And then the one that was in the accounting department would mark<br />
the thing as paid.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, she didn't. That was her mistake.<br />
<br />
David: Well, she didn't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because that wasn't her job.<br />
<br />
David: Well she blew one. In any event it was my advertising manager that<br />
we had sent an overdue notice to one of the advertisers.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Apple.<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Apple. It was Regis McKenna, it was Apple's agency.<br />
<br />
David: And they said, we paid that. And a woman said, well send me proof.<br />
And they did. And we looked at the bank where it was deposited and<br />
then we called in local detective, police department. And they got<br />
the bank records and said, "How much do you think this was?" Well<br />
no they didn't say that, they said, this is probably a lot more<br />
than you thought.<br />
And it turned out to be well over $100,000. And our total annual,<br />
not even profit at that point...well, the gross was just about a<br />
million at that point, not quite, but close to it. So $100,000 was<br />
a big, big chunk 10 percent.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When was this?<br />
<br />
David: '78. And, so, obviously we fired these two. And then the court<br />
finally, they determined that they had also, one of them had been<br />
involved in welfare fraud and other stuff and the court ordered<br />
them to pay it back at the rate of, I don't know...<br />
<br />
Betsy: 47 cents a week.<br />
<br />
David: It was some tiny amount.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 00:16:26]<br />
[laughter and crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Course they'll never pay anything.<br />
<br />
David: And we got one payment you know, and that was it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And she was ordered to do public service. Like who wants someone<br />
doing public service for them who's done something like that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Magazines back then, probably any business but, they were a hotbed<br />
of intrigue. You had that happened and then the whole Bike Magazine<br />
getting stolen.<br />
<br />
David: So Betsy actually, in response to that brought, in response to the<br />
embezzlement brought in her Sister-in-Law Bobbi, and I think your<br />
mother too...<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Bobbi's mother.<br />
<br />
David: Bobbi's mother, OK. But one to...<br />
<br />
Betsy: My mother in law. I was a widow at the time.<br />
<br />
David: ...do some of the accounting because we didn't have an accountant<br />
and wanted just to help out and make some calls to advertisers and<br />
say can you speed up your payment a little bit and also calls to<br />
people that we owed money to, hey we're going to be maybe a little<br />
late. It really didn't look good. That was just a huge amount of<br />
money and so we had to stretch things out and hope that the growth<br />
continued so we could recover some of this.<br />
Betsy really rescued us there. It was amazing. We finally did<br />
stretch things out. What precipitated the separation with my wife<br />
at the time is I went home and told her this had happened and<br />
everything.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was Thanksgiving weekend. Day before Thanksgiving.<br />
<br />
David: The day before Thanksgiving is when we got all the information from<br />
the police department and I went home to my wife and she said, "You<br />
dumb...," well I won't repeat the whole thing but, "You are so<br />
stupid. You trust people." "Yes, I trust people." "You shouldn't<br />
trust people like that. Get out of the house. I can't put up with<br />
this anymore." So it was a good thing we had a two family house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had this two family house.<br />
<br />
David: I moved into the bedroom on one side.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He had his office on one side of the top floor in the back bedroom<br />
and his bedroom in the back bedroom on the other side and his<br />
kitchen. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is this the place I was reading about where your bedroom was above<br />
the kitchen?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yes. The Ted Nelson.<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, a lot of things precipitated. Because of that, we had to<br />
make some other changes on personnel and move some people around. I<br />
think after that then Betsy took more of a role in the editorial<br />
end of things.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Stayed there until the bitter end.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The bitter end. Actually, I was there after he was gone.<br />
<br />
David: That's true.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ziff continued to pay me several months after they closed the<br />
magazine to stay behind and clean up because we have a 75,000<br />
square foot building. Make sure that we don't dispose of the<br />
hardware and just basically get it ready.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When you quit at the phone company to start a magazine, that must<br />
have been scary.<br />
<br />
David: I had left Digital Equipment in 1974, and I'm sure you read the<br />
whole rationale behind that, and joined AT&T in marketing,<br />
educational marketing. Same thing I was doing at Deck but obviously<br />
marketing different products to a different mix of customers. AT&T,<br />
back then and perhaps today, they had a real formula that you're in<br />
a job for two years and then they rotate you out or they put you in<br />
another job.<br />
The way AT&T works is they have certain steps. There's a manager<br />
and then a director level. There are levels, one, two, three, four,<br />
five. The operating companies, like Pacific Bell and so on, have<br />
similar steps that are considered a half step below AT&T. What they<br />
do is they rotate you out to an operating company, a half step<br />
promotion, they rotate you back into AT&T, now you're a full step.<br />
You never get a full step in one company.<br />
<br />
They had offered me a rotation to Southern Bell. Birmingham,<br />
Alabama. "No. No." Then probably two or three months later said<br />
we've got an opening in Wisconsin Tel. "Oh my gosh. Come on,<br />
something sensible." I turned them down, which was bad. You can't<br />
turn down. If you turn down three you might as well retire.<br />
<br />
The third one was, in a sense, it wasn't a promotion but it was a<br />
sideways job jump within AT&T itself. I went from having the<br />
education group, which was about eight people, to corporate<br />
communications, which is about 100 people and a huge budget. I was<br />
responsible for all of the marketing communications for the whole<br />
Bell system. Not advertising.<br />
<br />
We had seminar centers, put out all kinds of educational pamphlets,<br />
even a magazine for our customers on how to use the equipment. I<br />
was doing that. It's a big job. It's a 50 hour a week job. Creative<br />
Computing was halfway down the block. I'd go there at lunch time,<br />
see how things were doing.<br />
<br />
As I said a little bit ago, when it looked like we were going to<br />
hit a million dollars I said I've got to get serious about this.<br />
That's when I resigned from AT&T. That was probably the first, I<br />
shouldn't say the first, but that was a major problem with my wife<br />
at that time. You're leaving AT&T? You're leaving all those<br />
benefits? What are you doing, you idiot? We were on the downward<br />
spiral at that point and then the embezzlement just sealed the<br />
whole thing.<br />
<br />
Leaving any job for an unknown thing like you started a little<br />
company and you leave your day job. You're making a real<br />
commitment.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Even once you were at Creative full time, it looks like you did a<br />
lot of everything. You were writing, you were doing programming,<br />
you were being the editor, the publisher and the editor which is<br />
not done anymore.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. I don't know. You can correct me. I don't think I was a<br />
control freak.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. You had Phil Ellenberg. You had just hired Phil Ellenberg as<br />
the advertising manager. Richie was doing it. Where did he come<br />
from? He came from some respectable place. He came from some<br />
respectable place, Phil Ellenberg.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, he did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was like a real person who had a real job, not like the rest of<br />
us. He was the ad manager. I think once you made the step to leave<br />
AT&T then you mostly concentrated on the editorial. You weren't<br />
selling ads and writing and you had Steve North who was doing a lot<br />
of the editorial.<br />
<br />
David: At the beginning, yeah. The thing is I'd be lying if I said I knew<br />
how things were going to go, I knew this was going to be a huge<br />
magazine some day. I had no clue. When I started Creative Computing<br />
there weren't even personal computers at that point. I was<br />
convinced, I guess, that they would come about. I had no idea that<br />
it would be three months later that the Altair came about. It was<br />
more that I thought that an educational magazine like we had been<br />
publishing at Deck should continue.<br />
Deck had dropped off. They stopped publishing Edu when I left the<br />
education group. Well, they published an issue or two but they<br />
really weren't serious about continuing it. Then you had all of<br />
these people out here in the west coast, the Hewlett Packard<br />
computers. They were publishing some good software, they had some<br />
good arrangements with Minnesota Educational Computers Consortium<br />
and some others to distribute stuff that they developed, but there<br />
was no information source for schools and teachers and kids that<br />
were using computers.<br />
<br />
That's what I envisioned initially, but then once the Altair and<br />
the others came out people buy this kit computer and say what can I<br />
do with it? We've got these programs that will run.<br />
<br />
Betsy: First you have to steal Basic.<br />
<br />
David: What?<br />
<br />
Betsy: First you have to steal Basic.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I noticed that, I don't know what it's called, the public opinion<br />
or I don't know the word, this part here. The number one magazine<br />
of computer applications.<br />
<br />
David: That was a Davis thing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It started off first issue a non-profit magazine of educational and<br />
recreational. That was November 1970. May/June 1975 the words non-<br />
profit disappeared.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He never set it up as a non-profit.<br />
<br />
David: I did not.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You started making a profit.<br />
<br />
David: That's right. [laughs]<br />
Betsy; It was the unintentionally non-profit.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Three years later it quietly changed into the number one magazine<br />
of computer applications and software.<br />
<br />
David: That was when Ziff Davis took over.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Really? No, that was '78.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, that was '78.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, '78.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He stayed until the end.<br />
<br />
David: Right. OK. You're right. Who knows. We changed it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It seemed like a good idea at the time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's clearly a shift from education to education plus other things.<br />
<br />
David: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think it was when he realized that if you really wanted to make a<br />
profit you had to leave education behind because teachers want<br />
everything for free, or they certainly did then.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They have some websites for teachers. They still do. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Schools, teachers, yeah, they want everything for free and they get<br />
a lot for free. Places like Huntington Computer Project. There was<br />
one out here, Oregon. Yes, there was. I think it was based right<br />
here in Portland. It would have been, right, if it was in Oregon?<br />
Yes, there was a computing consortium at that time, Hewlett Packard<br />
oriented.<br />
Then you had People's Computer Company down in California that was<br />
sort of providing stuff to schools. They were mostly into<br />
alternative schools and there were a lot of them in the Bay area at<br />
that time. In fact, there was a magazine or a newspaper, big thing,<br />
I don't know how often it came out, called the "De-school Primer".<br />
<br />
It was for people that...I won't say they were hippies but<br />
basically homeschoolers but they got together and said, "We're<br />
going to educate our kids outside of the public education system<br />
but we don't want to do it individually. We'll get together." There<br />
was a big movement there and they were into computers, unlike the<br />
public schools back in '75, '76.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Homeschooling back then was very avant-garde. It was not approved.<br />
<br />
David: Not like today. The shift away from education. That, of course, was<br />
partially driven by the hardware that was then available to people<br />
at home.<br />
When I first started the magazine, I had four editors over the<br />
years, five I guess, but Steve Gray had been publishing a<br />
newsletter, what he called the "Amateur Computer Group Newsletter".<br />
It was for engineers who were scavenging up old parts from<br />
Honeywell and IBM and GE and Deck and trying to put together a<br />
computer. You've got success stories and here's how you can make<br />
this worth together.<br />
<br />
That was a long way away from an Altair, but that's what I was<br />
focusing on, people that were doing that and education. Changed our<br />
focus. You're right. Good observation.<br />
<br />
Kevin: After that, do you feel the focus changed in the next 10 years?<br />
<br />
David: The focus changed largely due to selling the magazine to Ziff<br />
Davis.<br />
<br />
Kevin: When's that?<br />
<br />
David: We were negotiating for a while and I think the sale finally went<br />
through in '83. Yeah, '83. Maybe late '82 but roughly then. They<br />
felt that you need more of a business focus, small business and<br />
people running businesses out of their home. That's where it<br />
started but then we got into real small businesses. I shouldn't say<br />
real but a store front or a small manufacturer, something like<br />
that. That's probably a direction we would not have gone. I<br />
wouldn't have gone on my own.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We had a magazine called "Small Business Computing." Remember?<br />
<br />
David: That's right, we did. I would have kept Creative more targeted on<br />
the home market and still education, to some extent, but more on<br />
the home and people that were running a business, a single<br />
entrepreneur. You could review a spreadsheet or a small business<br />
computer or higher end printer or something but not lift it up to<br />
that next level up.<br />
When you're owned by somebody else and they say this is what we<br />
want to do you've got to be responsive to it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Why did you sell? Was it something that had to be done? I've read<br />
the official line.<br />
<br />
David: I think the official line is pretty close to the real line. What<br />
happened is the first magazine, maybe not the very first but the<br />
first sizable magazine, to sell was the Byte and they sold to<br />
McGraw Hill. Then there were three or four other sales. At the time<br />
there were maybe eight special interest publishers in the country.<br />
You had Hurst and CBS magazine and Ziff Davis. Maybe eight serious<br />
ones. There were some others that were, "Oh, it'd be nice if we<br />
could get into it."<br />
What happened is all of us at that point were spending maybe<br />
$100,000, $150,000 on circulation promotion. McGraw Hill says we<br />
want to get out there, we're going to spend a million dollars.<br />
They're mailing 10 times as much as we are. They're going to trade<br />
shows with big, elaborate booths and handing out all kinds of...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Free magazines.<br />
<br />
David: Not only free magazines but other stuff. That was half of it. The<br />
other half, which was probably more than half, was the advertising<br />
sales. We were using reps. We had different reps in different parts<br />
of the country, paying the rep commission on the advertising. When<br />
you are a McGraw Hill or a Hurst or a Ziff Davis you've got an in-<br />
house staff. They would have a reception at one of the computer<br />
conferences, a big deal.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We used to have a hospitality suite at the hotels in some of these<br />
conferences and then we would bring little hunks of cheese that we<br />
cut up from home and sneak the bottles of wine up the back stairway<br />
and they were having these big things with the giant balls of<br />
shrimp.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. It was just an order of magnitude different than what we<br />
could do. What happened, really, was that it got to the point where<br />
there were only three, really two, serious bidders that were still<br />
looking for a magazine and there are still about four magazines,<br />
four decent quality magazines, on the market and one was Compute,<br />
one was Interface Age. Personal Computing had just sold, there was<br />
us, and I forget who the fourth one was. There was four.<br />
<br />
Kevin: There were more magazines than buyers at this point.<br />
<br />
David: That's right. There were a lot more magazines, too, but there were<br />
four major players. One of the buyers, I didn't really regard them<br />
as serious, and that was Atari. I think they wanted to back into<br />
the thing. The two buyers left were CBS, and they had a magazine<br />
division at that time, and Ziff Davis and that was it. I said,<br />
"Man, I've got to make a deal here." That's what happened.<br />
I look back with hindsight. I said the guy, Robert I forget his<br />
last name, that owned Compute magazine, he held out. He held out<br />
until the end and he said, "I'm better than Interface Age," and he<br />
was and whatever the other one was, Family Computing, "I'm better<br />
than them." He got a really nice payoff from CBS because it was the<br />
last one and they wanted him. I don't know. If I had held off a<br />
little more would I have gotten more? Probably.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How much did you get?<br />
<br />
David: Can we publish this figure?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't know. I don't think we ever have.<br />
<br />
David: No, we never have.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's my chance for a scoop.<br />
<br />
David: Pardon?<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's my chance for a scoop.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] I'd rather not say. I can tell you Compute, if you ever<br />
read that number, which you will, it was seven times that much. It<br />
was huge. Huge. At that point, I think CBS just said we've got to<br />
get into this. We've really got to do something. The big loser was<br />
Bob Jones at Interface Age. He had a good magazine. That was a<br />
good, solid magazine. Bob Jones, he went to shows, he was always in<br />
a suit and tie. He would have fit into the corporate environment<br />
very well but he held out too long. I think he was holding out for<br />
even more.<br />
That's what I was afraid of. Less than a year later he was out of<br />
business. There was no way you could compete with these big guys.<br />
Ziff instantly started having these receptions at PC expos.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They had ad reps all over the country.<br />
<br />
David: Ad reps, yeah. Oh my gosh. We would not have survived.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Again, you [inaudible 00:41:03] .<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Not exactly right but yes. Wasn't bad. Wasn't bad.<br />
<br />
Kevin: But Ziff didn't have it for very long before they let it go. It was<br />
only a couple of years.<br />
<br />
David: It was almost four years. Three and a half years. They did a study,<br />
and this is one of the classics. I've been making a presentation at<br />
Leslie Park last year on the 10 biggest blunders in personal<br />
computing, and actually it's up to 12 now. One was, and I still<br />
feel that it was huge, is that Ziff Davis analyzed that market in<br />
'85 and determined that the home market, the market for home<br />
computers, had reached saturation. Five percent of the homes have a<br />
computer. That's it.<br />
There were three things, three major conclusions from their survey.<br />
I think probably one and a half of them were pretty good and one<br />
and a half were just absolutely wrong. The home market reaching<br />
saturation, wrong. The second one was that they said that the<br />
magazines that would be successful would be those that were focused<br />
on specific brands of computers. Are you getting all that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: With the IBM PC it really brought standardization to the industry.<br />
Their analysis was that Apple and PC were going to be the dominant<br />
players in the future and in that they were right. They said we've<br />
got to have a magazine that's just focused on those two and they<br />
did. What was their Apple magazine? They had two Apple magazines.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A+.<br />
<br />
David: But they also had the one for the Mac.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mac User.<br />
<br />
David: They had two Apple magazines and then PC. PC they spun off a whole<br />
bunch. PC Week.<br />
<br />
Betsy: PC Junior.<br />
<br />
David: A bunch of them. In any event, they were right in that. The other<br />
one that they were semi-right, in the long term future they were<br />
totally wrong but in the short term future they were probably<br />
right, and that they looked at...We had been covering bulletin<br />
board systems. CompuServe, whatever its predecessor was, basically<br />
online type of stuff.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Genie.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. They said that's just a flash in a pan, online stuff. Well, in<br />
'85 it was. It took a while. It took another 8 to 10 years for that<br />
but then oh my God. You know what's happened today. If they had<br />
stuck with Creative Computing and rather than trying to make it a<br />
small business focused magazine but kept the home and the online<br />
focus we would have owned the Internet market today, absolutely<br />
owned it. It would have been a bigger magazine than all the others<br />
put together. Hindsight is 20/20.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I know it wasn't your choice but do you have regret about that?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: At the time it was devastating.<br />
<br />
David: Absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was like someone killing your child.<br />
<br />
David: At the time, we sat in these meetings up in Stanford, Connecticut,<br />
of all places. The reason for that is Bill Ziff. What happened in<br />
the interim a year or two after they purchased Creative Computing<br />
and PC, Bill Ziff came down with cancer really big time and was<br />
afraid of dying next year. So he was moving all of his resources<br />
and the holdings outside of New York to avoid really major<br />
taxation. I'm not sure that Connecticut was much better but he was<br />
splitting them between Connecticut and Florida. Anyway, we wound up<br />
having a bunch of meetings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was trying to maintain residence in Connecticut.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I guess that was it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was living in the Crown Plaza.<br />
<br />
David: I remember the last one. We were up at the hotel.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Crown Plaza. It was Stanford, it wasn't Harvard.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, Stanford.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I said Harvard.<br />
<br />
David: When they finally came and said we're going to shut this down. That<br />
was a devastating time. We probably could have continued to work<br />
for Ziff if we had been willing to go into New York but when you<br />
get used to working a mile or two from where you live the idea of<br />
commuting into New York, who knows what the job would have been.<br />
Bye. That was it. That was, in retrospect, a mistake.<br />
The other thing that happened as a result of Bill Ziff having this<br />
bout with cancer is that Ziff Davis sold off all of their other<br />
special interest magazines. Popular Boating, Popular Photography.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yachting, Modern Bride.<br />
<br />
David: They had a big group of travel magazines. Actually, one of the<br />
things they did after Creative Computing was to shut down...we got<br />
friendly with the publisher and some of the people in the traveling<br />
division and we started doing some freelance travel writing.<br />
I was writing a monthly column for one of the travel magazines that<br />
went to travel agents on automating your travel office and so on,<br />
which was an interesting thing because there's a small business<br />
that really depended upon computers with the reservation systems<br />
and all the airlines had a different reservation system. You had to<br />
have Saber.<br />
<br />
A lot of them would go with one and make an agreement with somebody<br />
else to make their other reservations. In any event, it was a bad<br />
system and I was writing a column on how to make this work for you.<br />
As you know, I don't know how many months later we got into the<br />
Atari camp.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was your next gig?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. It was Joe Sugarman, remember, that hooked us up with Atari.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I thought it was Neil Harris.<br />
<br />
David: He was the one we worked with but it was Sugarman.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because he came from Commodore. I didn't know it was Joe Sugarman.<br />
<br />
David: He ran a company called JS&A for Joe Sugarman and Associates. They<br />
were the first one that took these full page ads in lots of<br />
different magazines and the quarter page...<br />
<br />
Betsy: The first advertorials.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, advertorial. The first print advertorials. Really serious<br />
stuff. Out of that, he spawned at least a dozen other companies.<br />
Sharper Image is a Sugarman and it's a spinoff. They've got a whole<br />
page just focused on this air ionizer or some crazy product, but he<br />
sold tons of that stuff. Then he started offering courses. He was<br />
on the verge of doing some big deal with Atari and so he knew all<br />
the people out there.<br />
I had taken his course and started running the ad. In fact, there's<br />
probably one in one of those issues that is basically a Sugarman<br />
ad. And so anyway, you took the course, too. So we got to know him.<br />
He got to know us, and we kept up. And, oh, OK. Creative Computing<br />
has folded, and I'm trying to get something going with Atari and<br />
getting their magazine really serious. And so he was the one that<br />
hooked us up with them. By the way, I'm surprised that you don't<br />
have Atari Explorer on your website<br />
<br />
Kevin: On the website? Well, the deal with my Atari magazines website is<br />
I've always strove to get permission. Atari can't be owned by the<br />
same company for more than three months at time.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's hard to get permission that way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You can't get permission. But it's out there, elsewhere. There are<br />
other archivists who don't bother to get permission. That's another<br />
good way to do things. Yeah, it's out there. I think Archive.org<br />
has it.<br />
<br />
David: Really? Yeah, because I hadn't seen it. I was looking for<br />
something...I still get inquires every once in a while from<br />
somebody that wants something in one of the previous magazines that<br />
we've published.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That's why I don't' risk it. There's a few magazine that I just<br />
absolutely would not, because it's owned by some giant monolith<br />
corporation now, and they need to hold on everything even if it's<br />
30 years old.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Because someday they might be able to make money from it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right. That's why that's not there.<br />
Talk to me about...You did some weird stuff. The weird stuff I'm<br />
thinking of is the board game.<br />
<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: "Computer Rage."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We just saw that. We might not have even remembered what it was it,<br />
but we saw it last night at the museum.<br />
<br />
David: They have one in the Collection's area of the Computer Museum. They<br />
didn't even know that we published it. I thought, "Look at this."<br />
<br />
Kevin: You did Computer Rage, which was weird; I want to ask you about<br />
that. You did the record album.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The record album made way more sense than the game.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, well it was a guy named Allan. He was a colonel at that time<br />
and he came to see me with the idea for the computer game.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I forgot about that.<br />
<br />
David: He was a colonel in the Army and had something to do with<br />
educational programs. The Army said people should know more about<br />
how computers work and everything else. He said, "The games that<br />
are on the market are pretty tacky and not fun. I've devised<br />
something." We worked together with him. We finally decided, "All<br />
right. We'll publish this game. By the way, he's a general and<br />
finally retired.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But he's not financing his retirement with [inaudible 00:54:29] .<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: No, not at all.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Will anyone buy this?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We did overprint.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't a big seller or big success, but we sold enough of them.<br />
Now the record was a little different. There was a guy named Dick<br />
Moberg who, at the time, was the president of the Philadelphia Area<br />
Computer Society. The first two personal computer festivals were<br />
actually in New Jersey, not the west coast. The West Coast Computer<br />
Faire came later with Jim Warren and that group. John Dilks started<br />
this computer festival in Atlantic City. This was before Atlantic<br />
City was a big casino place, but...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well, it was a casino place, but...<br />
<br />
David: ...but it was pretty tacky.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It still is.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Not like now.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not like now where it's so classy.<br />
<br />
David: In any event, they were having some issues with the hotel and the<br />
convention center in Atlantic City. Dick Moberg said, "We people in<br />
Philadelphia can do a better job than you guys in New Jersey." And<br />
he got together with what was his name? Lenny? And<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh! Saul Levis.<br />
<br />
David: Saul Levis, who was the president of the New Jersey amateur<br />
computer group. The two of them got together and said yeah, it'll<br />
be more convenient if we do a thing in Philadelphia. And Saul<br />
Levis, he had put together the first Trenton computer festival. It<br />
wasn't a big huge thing; it's gotten to be gigantic. In any event<br />
they said OK, we'll do this. At that point, this was '78; the Apple<br />
had just come out and people were making little plug-in<br />
peripherals.<br />
There was a company that...I'm not going to be able to remember who<br />
it was. They made a nice little plug-in board for the Apple. What<br />
they had was a very nice thing on the screen where you could<br />
position notes and then have them played back. So it was a visual<br />
programming of music.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Music Construction Center?<br />
<br />
Betsy: There were ads for it in magazines.<br />
<br />
David: No, it was a guy out of Denver. I don't remember. Anyway, before<br />
that everything had appeared line by line. But there were some<br />
reasonable playback systems that were starting to come on the<br />
market for the S-100 bus. There were about four of them. The<br />
programming was a little bit harrier, but nonetheless they sounded<br />
OK. And then there was still the leftovers in a sense that people<br />
that were doing work on mainframes to process music.<br />
So Dick Moberg said, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could get a number<br />
of these together?" And of course there's the Philadelphia<br />
Orchestra, we'll make it a Philadelphia Computer Music Festival! So<br />
it was largely his idea, but then, how do you publicize it? Well,<br />
you've got this magazine that's in your backyard, that was willing<br />
to recruit some people and publicize it. So we got about...I don't<br />
know at the festival there were probably 25 or 30 people that had<br />
stuff.<br />
<br />
They recorded it all, which in retrospect was a bit of a mistake<br />
because they had problems with one of the two channels in the<br />
stereo. They had the big reel-to-reel tape recorder, one of the<br />
channels was seriously too low. And then they said, "Well, we've<br />
got this wonderful tape; what are we going to do with it?" And I<br />
said, "Well, I'll do something with it."<br />
<br />
I hooked up with a studio in the city that made records, and we<br />
went in there and corrected the low channel a little bit, not<br />
totally, but enough that it sounded like stereo. And put together a<br />
vinyl record!<br />
<br />
I edited out a lot of the poor quality performances, made the<br />
record, and that sold! It sold pretty well. Our biggest problem was<br />
shipping. How do you ship a 12-inch vinyl record without it<br />
breaking? But that sold pretty well. That, of course, died off<br />
along with everything else when Creative Computing got killed by<br />
Ziff. But, I still had the original test pressing of that, the<br />
original, original.<br />
<br />
I played it back, and it sounded very good. Put it into, I forget<br />
what the software was, but, it was one, the digital routine. It<br />
would have been nice if I still had the original tape, but, I<br />
didn't. But, OK, it's got a little bit of deterioration, going to a<br />
record.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, we're not talking about losing overtones of a<br />
violin up at 15,000 hertz. It was within a narrow band, to begin<br />
with, in any event. But that did let me totally correct the left<br />
channel and bring it up to what it should be. I put that out. I'm<br />
selling CDs now, of that.<br />
<br />
In fact, a guy from Australia ordered one, and obviously, the<br />
postage to send anything overseas is a lot more. He said, "Why<br />
don't you just make MP3 files out of it?" Because, they're WAV<br />
files, the way they are now. I go, "OK."<br />
<br />
This is very recent, like within the last couple of weeks, I<br />
downloaded some software, "Convert WAV to MP3," converted it, sent<br />
them the files. They said, "That's great." What I think what I'll<br />
probably do is try to figure out how I can make them available from<br />
a website.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You've apparently forgotten that, like, 10 years ago, I did that.<br />
They're there.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. I know.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They're at vintagecomputermusic.com.<br />
<br />
David: Are they MP3s?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Well, then, I don't have to do it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You dummy.<br />
<br />
David: Bam. I did remember. I didn't know that you did them all. I thought<br />
you did a sample.<br />
<br />
Kevin: No. They're all there. I can see you're getting reflux.<br />
<br />
David: Boom. I wasted a little time. I waste a lot of time, these days.<br />
That was a cool thing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just think it was neat that you guys were willing to take chances<br />
with weird stuff.<br />
<br />
David: Where we took chances with really weird stuff was in the software.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Software publishing?<br />
<br />
David: We had a brand called, Sensational Software. Unfortunately, Ziff<br />
decided it was competing with some potential advertisers, which it<br />
was, in a sense. They killed it off. But, we had some really good<br />
stuff. We had the Apple game, what the heck was it? It was ported<br />
directly over from the arcade games.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Was it, "Space Invaders"?<br />
<br />
David: "Space Invaders."<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was a clone of, "Space Invaders"?<br />
<br />
David: It was the real.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You got it from, Jeff Lee's guy.<br />
<br />
David: Because, "Space Invaders," the Japanese game, was one of the first<br />
full-sized console video games where they used a general-purpose<br />
chip. "Space Invaders," was programmed for the 6502, Apple.<br />
We bought it from this Japanese company, and we had the only real<br />
"Space Invaders" game. That was one, and a couple of others that we<br />
really could have gone places with. That was just about the time<br />
that Ziff came in and said, "Nah, you can't have this anymore."<br />
<br />
They were into printed media, so, they kept the books going, but,<br />
not any of the other stuff. The other thing we had, was, speaking<br />
of computer music, a little division, that probably could have<br />
gotten a lot bigger, called Peripherals Plus. We were marketing a<br />
little computer music board, it was an S-100 bus once. But if we<br />
had then...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Didn't we have a plotter, too?<br />
<br />
David: Yep. We had about five or six interesting, low-level products. But,<br />
again, Ziff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That stuff was really competing with the advertisers.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Obviously, that wasn't our intent. But, yes it was. We also<br />
offered courses at that time. Do you remember, at County College?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't.<br />
<br />
David: That was just at when we moved into the new building at Hanover. We<br />
had two people that were doing that.<br />
<br />
Betsy: One of them was that crazy, Larry guy. He was seriously weird.<br />
<br />
David: County College of Morris, we reached an agreement that we would<br />
teach their Introductory Computer course. Not for their day<br />
students, but they offered evening courses, adult education, we<br />
were doing that. Fingers in a lot of pies, at that point.<br />
Actually, from that standpoint, it was, probably, good that Ziff<br />
got us a little bit more focused, and back to the roots of<br />
publishing. Getting spread a little thin.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You went to Atari, got the Atari game, and you did the "Atari<br />
Explorer," right?<br />
<br />
David: "Atari Explorer." They had had an occasional publication, not<br />
really a magazine, but one that was focused on the games, and they<br />
decided that they could start that one up again. It started up with<br />
a new name. We called it, "Atarian." It was focused, basically, on<br />
video games. You buy one of their video games and you get an issue.<br />
Anyway, there were different ways that they were going to promote<br />
it.<br />
But, a year later Nintendo just, absolutely, buried "Atarian," in<br />
'89. They kept Atari Spore going for, I think, two more issues,<br />
right?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Was it two?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember the details.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't much.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I remember why they killed it.<br />
<br />
David: Ms. Feisty here. Come on. You've got to tell the story here.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They were playing games with our printer. Production schedule.<br />
Everybody had a production schedule. We never missed our production<br />
date, getting things to the printer, getting them mailed. We just<br />
did it because that's what you had to do. I will probably get sued<br />
for this. Atari started not paying the printer and the printer says<br />
we're not going to print this until we get paid. The date kept<br />
slipping and slipping and the subscribers would be calling up and<br />
saying, "Where's my magazine?"<br />
This went on. It was bi-monthly. It went on for maybe six months. I<br />
finally wrote an editorial in which I explained to the readers<br />
exactly what was going on. They didn't see it until it was printed.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
David: That didn't get into the magazine, though.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It did.<br />
<br />
David: That's right, it did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They never saw it. We were producing it out of [inaudible 01:10:07]<br />
New Jersey and printing it in eastern Pennsylvania and they never<br />
saw it until it was too late. My tenure was cut short but I didn't<br />
really care at that point. I was sick of them. It was really hard.<br />
They're not easy people to deal with, even when the owners last for<br />
more than three months. That was my suicide by editorial. The only<br />
time in my life I've ever been fired.<br />
<br />
David: I didn't realize they didn't read that beforehand but I should<br />
have. I should have.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] I probably wouldn't have gotten fired if they had.<br />
<br />
David: That was the straw that broke the camera's back.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But then John [inaudible 01:11:05] kept doing it a little bit.<br />
<br />
David: I know. In a lot of cases, particularly with the games magazine,<br />
they wanted to approve everything that went in it. If you do an<br />
objective product review, you call it like it is. Oh m gosh, there<br />
was one, it wasn't just one product but a roundup after Consumer<br />
Electronics' show, and I don't remember what it was. Atari had<br />
brought out some new products that really weren't ready to go.<br />
In some cases I just said, "I'm not going to say anything about<br />
this one or these two or three. I'll focus on the ones that are<br />
ready to go or are in good shape." Oh my gosh. "What about this?<br />
This is a wonderful thing." "Well, maybe it will be but it isn't<br />
yet." We had issues all along on censorship and them changing what<br />
we had written and everything. As Betsy said, they were not nice<br />
people to work with. I forget, the two brothers.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Trammell.<br />
<br />
David: Trammell, yeah. That came from Commodore.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Jack and somebody else. Jack and his brother.<br />
<br />
David: It was interesting because yesterday I saw Nolan Bushnell. He was<br />
at that event. Nolan was flamboyant, but basically he had integrity<br />
and he was an honest guy. Man, oh man. Didn't stay and the<br />
corporation changed after he left.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Then you're done with Atari and then it's straight to military<br />
vehicles there?<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] No.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was a hiatus.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, man. We published magazines, in-house magazines, for a couple<br />
other organizations. Did one for Nabisco called...I don't even<br />
remember but it was for their marketing department. Published that<br />
for some period of time and then they decided to bring it in-house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was more like a newsletter.<br />
<br />
David: It was 16 pages. It was getting there.<br />
<br />
Betsy: 16 pages is a newsletter.<br />
<br />
David: All right. Magazine format. Let's put it that way. We did some<br />
fulfillment. Basically, a lot of freelance writing on the travel<br />
field.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Stuffed dogs. The stuffed dogs. Remember those four dogs for my<br />
brother?<br />
<br />
David: That's fulfillment. Fulfillment for Con Edison. I published a<br />
couple newsletters for a while, one called "Effective Investing"<br />
and one called "Effective Communication" for writers. We're talking<br />
early '90s.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was when people still cared, thought that there might be a<br />
correct way to do something and they wanted to know what it was.<br />
<br />
David: That was focused on "Take this computer and start to use it as a<br />
tool. Don't be afraid of the thing." '91/'92 not everybody was<br />
using a computer yet or a personal computer. That was the<br />
orientation of that. Then the other thing we got into big time was<br />
we'd been involved with a local rescue mission for men with drug,<br />
alcohol, homeless issues and we were writing and producing their<br />
newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We were producing all of their fundraising material.<br />
<br />
David: We started, I think, with the newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, we did everything. Appeal letters and newsletters and<br />
maintaining their database, the donor database. It took a lot of<br />
time.<br />
<br />
David: We did that for five years. Then '96 I got an opportunity to buy<br />
this crazy military vehicles magazine for people that were<br />
restoring old historic military vehicles. It was a magazine but it<br />
was I guess more of a glorified newsletter.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was horrible.<br />
<br />
David: It was horrible but it was really terrible. In fact, the editor or<br />
the publisher, whatever, the owner, he'd take the articles however<br />
the writer would send them. If it was double spaced type, boom,<br />
that's what would appear in the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Save all the typesetting.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He had zero typesetting expense.<br />
<br />
David: Zero editing. He just took anything that came in, put it in. Ads<br />
the same way. Half the ads were hand written. Well, not half, but a<br />
significant number had corrections on them by hand. Oh my gosh. It<br />
was so terrible. I made it into a real magazine and built it up. At<br />
that point the circulation had been about 10,000. We built it up<br />
and we were pushing close to 20,000 magazines. It was a real<br />
magazine. I sold it to Crowsey publications.<br />
Then they, which I did not realize at the time, the owner, Chet<br />
Crowsey, had put the whole company up for sale and he sold the<br />
company a year or two later to some other specialty magazine<br />
publisher. We're talking narrow, narrow niche. They published a lot<br />
of, what'd they call it, white tail bow hunting. Really, really<br />
narrow stuff. Up in northern Wisconsin is where they were based. In<br />
any event, he sold it.<br />
<br />
The new publishers, their whole stick was making money. They<br />
immediately raised the subscription price of military vehicles. We<br />
were charging $18 a year which was fine and they raised it to<br />
$21.95 or something and they raised the advertising rates and<br />
everything else.<br />
<br />
The last I knew, the circulation was back down around 10,000.<br />
[laughs] It doesn't pay off to take that approach. I didn't have<br />
the same emotional connection, with that as I did with Creative<br />
Computing and the other magazines there. Fine, you do what you want<br />
with the magazine, it's OK.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You didn't care too much?<br />
<br />
David: Nah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What do you guys do now? It seems like charity work and [inaudible<br />
01:19:45] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. I run a non-profit called Beyond the Walls and he runs his<br />
website and does Bible studies.<br />
<br />
David: Right. Actually, Betsy, the organization she has, she's executive<br />
director of Beyond the Wall, that's gotten huge.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's getting bigger and bigger.<br />
<br />
David: It's gotten huge.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think huge is probably an exaggeration.<br />
<br />
David: Well, not huge like a Gates Foundation thing.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I wish. We started in 2005 with 26 volunteers going to Guatemala to<br />
work with this organization that works with the people who scavenge<br />
in the Guatemala City garbage dump. The dump is in a ravine. It<br />
started in the early '50s and as it has filled up around the edges<br />
they put a couple layers of sand on it and let it sit for a bit and<br />
then the people build houses on it out of scraps and things that<br />
they made.<br />
This organization called Potter's House that we work with has been<br />
working with them for 26 years. They have an education program,<br />
micro-enterprise and health and various things that they do. Since<br />
2005 we've been sending volunteer teams. We're not the only ones<br />
sending volunteer teams down there to build houses and do<br />
healthcare and do stuff with the kids. So we started with 26 and by<br />
the end of the year we'll be well over 150 volunteers. We'll have<br />
three weeks this summer, I'll have 135 over three weeks this<br />
summer.<br />
<br />
It started in our backyard and one of the reasons that we wanted<br />
to...It started in the church and we started the organization<br />
partially because it's easier to raise money if you're not a church<br />
and it's also easier to make the volunteer opportunities available<br />
to people. If you say "Oh I'm going to Guatemala." "Oh I'd love to<br />
go with you! Who's going?" "It's my church." "Oh."<br />
<br />
But, if it's this local non-profit it's more appealing and we've<br />
really succeeded in doing that because we have people not only from<br />
in our own community, but this year we're going to have a family<br />
from Oklahoma, about six families from Texas, several people from<br />
Florida.<br />
<br />
David: You got the Virginia.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Virginia. It's like oh my goodness. How is this happening?<br />
<br />
Kevin: And everyone goes out to Guatemala and does the [inaudible<br />
01:22:31] ?<br />
[cross talk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. We all meet in Guatemala. I have three teams. One each week,<br />
and I'll be there the whole time and they'll come down and probably<br />
each team will build two or three houses. They'll do medical<br />
clinic, they'll do day camp for kids, soccer or baseball, sports<br />
things.<br />
They were about teenagers, so they love to do the...Everybody does<br />
construction in the morning. Then, in the afternoon teenage girls<br />
and some of the boys who want to do other stuff will help out with<br />
these other kid-related activities. That's what I'm doing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My wife is in Africa this week and last doing something similar.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Cool.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Which is why I have to leave shortly to go get my kids.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: What part of Africa is she in?<br />
<br />
Kevin: She did some stuff for Special Olympics. Then, they were helping<br />
build something at a food bank. I don't know that much yet, because<br />
she's not home yet.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Cool.<br />
<br />
David: That's terrific. She'll be changed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: She keeps telling that she wished I could've come, and I do, too.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You have this kid. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: We've got the two kids. The six-year-old doesn't feed herself real<br />
well.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: She can't drive to school.<br />
<br />
David: Your annual budget has gone from 0 to what? Are you going to hit<br />
about 150, 200,000 this year?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's over 300 already.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, OK. [laughs] 300.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's small potatoes compared to...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: As my boss, the Chairman of the Board, and I'm the only employee,<br />
is fond of saying, "The people out there don't realize that we're<br />
just a bunch of schlumps sitting around a table making this stuff<br />
up as we go along. Very good leadership. He's a very good leader.<br />
<br />
David: We were trying to maybe see if we can touch base with the Gates<br />
Foundation when we were up there. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: We got a brochure into his hands.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we got a brochure into his hands and some other stuff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was Bill Gates there?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah. I had a picture of him that I had taken at the first<br />
Altair convention in 1976, before he had actually made the deal<br />
with Altair to develop BASIC. He had said, "I can do it," but they<br />
hadn't signed the whole thing. I've got a picture of him as a 20-<br />
year-old or thereabouts, talking at this little convention.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You showed it to him?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. I gave him a copy. The problem I had is that...some people<br />
keep everything. I pretty much give everything away.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, you are lying. You keep everything.<br />
<br />
David: I do keep a lot of stuff. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Then, you give it away later. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Well, when Stan Freiberger was putting together the "Fire in<br />
the Valley" book, I gave him a lot of photographs and I gave him<br />
the originals. Then the publisher said, "It's not good enough. The<br />
photo. You get the negative." OK, they're gone. Never any of that<br />
came back. In fact, what I had to do is scan the photo from the<br />
book to make the print to give to Bill.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Photos of being young and cute.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was his Woody Allen phase. He looked exactly like Woody Allen<br />
did at that phase in his life.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:26:30] too.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm sure there is.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It is a lot [inaudible 01:26:33] .<br />
<br />
David: She improves with age. Every year.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I saw the picture! You look the same.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, the instant Paul Allen showed up, of course, everybody's<br />
mingling around this museum. All of a sudden there was like an<br />
arrow head over in that direction.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was this sucking sound.<br />
<br />
David: And then Bill shows up and, oh my God, everybody has to go see<br />
Bill.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was talking to Bob Rynett this morning, the guy who organized it,<br />
and he said, "Oh, Paul was very happy. Paul was very pleased with<br />
the way the event went." He said his only regret was that he and<br />
Bill didn't have enough time to spend with the people. And I'm<br />
thinking, "Well, OK, if you just stayed a little longer."<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Well, at least Paul Allen did come to the dinner.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, he stayed a little longer, but Bill, he was in and out like<br />
a...<br />
<br />
David: Bill was there for maybe an hour.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He just showed up because he had to.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, exactly. It was a cameo.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:27:52] cameo there?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, yes. There I am. I was thinner then. Oh! There's Ted in his<br />
hat! And Peter [inaudible 01:28:02] . Who's that guy?<br />
<br />
David: Dick Heiser was at the convention and he had one of the hats. The<br />
Xanadu hat.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was wearing one of those hats. The rings were actually silver.<br />
Oh and there's Johnny Anderson. He's the one that wrote that<br />
crazy...<br />
<br />
This was our building.<br />
<br />
David: That was the greenhouse garage building that we started. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: And there was a hole. Was it you or my brother that made a hole in<br />
the wall for an air conditioner?<br />
<br />
David: It was your brother.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And the building was painted white after...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Is that the air conditioner? You comment about the low tech air<br />
conditioning.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, that was in an actual window. This building had been painted<br />
white after and right about here a hole had been made in the wall<br />
for this through-the-wall air conditioner. It was rented and when<br />
we moved out, we had this hole in the wall. So, my brother takes<br />
this spare ceiling panel that we had. It was white and sort of<br />
stuffed it in the hole and filled it up so that it really didn't<br />
show any more. We never heard any more about it.<br />
<br />
David: That building today is...<br />
<br />
Betsy: They've made it very fancy.<br />
<br />
David: Oh my gosh! It's a boutique shop and it's really nice. And they<br />
didn't even tear it down. It wasn't a tear-down and rebuild. At any<br />
event, we were not into spending money on facilities. Absolutely<br />
not. The last place that we were in was a printing company had<br />
owned it and they had taken three very small houses that backed up<br />
to railroad tracks and then they built a large warehouse at the end<br />
that was relatively modern. Then they just connected the three<br />
houses with little walkway and so we were in the first house.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You couldn't tell that it was two houses.<br />
<br />
David: No. The art department was in the second, then the software group<br />
was in the third one. We had our fulfillment and storage and stuff<br />
in the warehouse.<br />
<br />
Kevin: How much money did you spend on the facility?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not much.<br />
<br />
David: We were spending money on expansion, growing, grow, grow. Then Ziff<br />
Davis comes in, they say, "You got this wonderful warehouse."<br />
<br />
Kevin: It's our warehouse now, right?<br />
<br />
David: That's right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It wasn't though, because you owned it.<br />
<br />
David: I know, but in any event, they said we're going to use it. We're<br />
moving some of your operation, advertising, sales into New York,<br />
therefore you will have more space. It wasn't the trade-off of the<br />
same kind of space or anything. What they did is, they have all<br />
these other magazines at that point, things like "Popular Boating"<br />
and "Yachting" and everything else. All of those magazines, when<br />
you subscribed you got a premium. You got a tote bag or something.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A backpack or a cushion.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. They moved all of their premium fulfillment out to our<br />
warehouse. They said, "Because you're not going to have a software<br />
department anymore, so you won't have to ship any software. We're<br />
going to bring all of our premiums out there." We still have<br />
"Yachting" bags.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yachting bags and seat bags.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Speaking of fulfillment that was something that we did. We were<br />
real pioneers in doing our own fulfillment.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: That's true...<br />
<br />
Betsy: All magazines then used fulfillment houses. You would just send all<br />
the little cards and white mail and everything to your fulfillment<br />
house and they would just take care, enter it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Reader service cards and...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Exactly, and then they would send the labels.<br />
<br />
David: Everything went either to Boulder, Colorado, Des Moines, Iowa, or<br />
some place in Florida.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So when you say pioneers, does that mean you were cheap?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well no, because we were not getting good service, we weren't happy<br />
with the service the readers were getting. And so we decided to<br />
bring it in it house, and we brought a program from a company in<br />
Boston that had written a program to run a PDP11.<br />
And we did we brought the whole thing in-house. We had our own data<br />
entry people. Did all the caging, taking the money out in-house.<br />
Printed our own labels and ship, because then you had to print them<br />
and ship them because there was no electronic delivery.<br />
<br />
David: You know we were real pioneers there and we did spent some money.<br />
Because PDP1170 was not a low-end, with a platter and disk, 12<br />
inch, maybe 15 inch, but a big, big platter drive, and data entry<br />
terminals, deck writers, BTO5. And when Ziff came in, I mean they<br />
were blown away that we were doing our own fulfillment, and doing a<br />
very efficiently.<br />
And the other thing we were doing also was the reader service<br />
cards. We were doing all our own processing of that. The same<br />
computer is same system. A Mini Data System, that's what it was.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No.<br />
<br />
David: No? OK.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mini data was the one you were using...<br />
<br />
[Day 2]<br />
<br />
<br />
David: A couple of the questions you asked yesterday got us to thinking<br />
about things we probably should have mentioned or clarified.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK let's go, let me grab a pen.<br />
<br />
David: One of the corrections, Betsy remembered better than I. the<br />
embezzlement that we were talking about was actually 79 not 78 it<br />
doesn't make a lot of difference but was a year later. It was a<br />
year after I had left my day job, and I was really depending upon<br />
Creative Computing for my income and everything else. So to lose<br />
that was a big blow at that time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So that could have been the end of things right there?<br />
<br />
David: Yes absolutely it could have.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was 79 not 78, is what you're saying.<br />
<br />
David: That's what I said it was 79 not 78.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I was going to ask you to move closer to the microphone.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Actually I don't have to do this. My ego is completely uninvolved.<br />
I would go sit and play with the cats.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Please, please be here. You supplement Dave's memory.<br />
<br />
David: Yes exactly she's very good at that.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: I want to know, how are you going to know how to spell things? He<br />
used the name John Dilks. If you go to write it out, how do you<br />
know how to spell John Dilks?<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'll either Google it, and if it's not in Wikipedia, I'll have to<br />
come back to you and ask, or if they're mentioned in the magazines.<br />
I'll do my best.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm not saying it in a critical way, I'm just impressed that you<br />
don't ask.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just feel this way, I can have everything. I don't have to write<br />
it down. I can concentrate on the conversation, rather than taking<br />
notes.<br />
<br />
David: OK. One thing I thought would be kind of worthwhile...putting the<br />
whole era of the early computer magazines into a perspective. In a<br />
sense, personal computing itself went through several eras as it<br />
accelerated and became so widespread. It certainly didn't start<br />
that way.<br />
You almost have to look at a period before there were personal<br />
computers -- the pre-personal computer era, which I would say would<br />
be 1972 or so up through '75, when the first computers came out.<br />
What was happening then was you had big time-sharing systems.<br />
<br />
Then, manufacturers like DEC and HP were making smaller time-<br />
sharing systems for terminals on a computer. Specifically, Bob<br />
Albrecht opened up People's Computer Company down in San Carlos,<br />
San Mateo, one of the "Sans." It was an open to the public place.<br />
What were people going to do with computers? Well, he wrote this<br />
book of what to do after you hit return, of games.<br />
<br />
Then I wrote my book, not for his center, but for people in the<br />
east that had access to the same type of things on DEC computers.<br />
Those two books actually came out in '72. That was well<br />
before....There was an impetus for people to use computers. Even<br />
though it was mini-computers and they didn't really have their own,<br />
they did have access.<br />
<br />
That, I think, was an important thing because, then, when the kit<br />
computers first came out, which is '75, we really had the kit<br />
computer era from '75 to around '78. That's when it primary was,<br />
the do-it-yourself, build-it-yourself.<br />
<br />
Who did those computers appeal to? It was largely people who were<br />
OK with things like soldering guns. That was largely HAM radio<br />
people. You look at "73" magazine and "Radio Electronics," those<br />
were the ones that dragged the hardware people into the field, and<br />
"Popular Electronics," of course, with the Altair in January, '75.<br />
<br />
You had to know something about, and be a little bit capable with<br />
your hands to get into it. That continued but dwindled off by 1980,<br />
because of course, in '78, you had the three biggies, not biggies,<br />
but self-contained, assembled computers: the Commodore PET, TRS-80,<br />
and the Apple all came out in '78. They were proprietary platforms,<br />
nobody was sharing stuff.<br />
<br />
Actually, the S-100 bus was more shareable. More people got a card<br />
that you could plug into the S-100 bus. There was more, but on the<br />
other hand, you had to build it. That was really a stumbling block<br />
for a lot of people. Then processor technology with the SAL. OK,<br />
here's an S-100 bus machine, but it's all built. That was a big<br />
leap.<br />
<br />
Anyway, you had the, what I call, proprietary era from '78 to '82.<br />
Then it kind of dwindled off, although Apple certainly kept going.<br />
When the IBM PC came out, '81, '82, '83, that ushered in the<br />
standardization era. Everybody, "OK, we're going to make an IBM PC<br />
clone." It was really only Apple, and to a lesser extent, the Atari<br />
and the Commodore that kept going with their own proprietary stuff.<br />
They really couldn't keep going.<br />
<br />
At that time, we started working with Atari. They using the same<br />
chip that Apple had. I thought, "Man, that's an opportunity. Why<br />
don't they just make an agreement with Apple to run Apple software<br />
and everything." They got a 6502, that family of chips in there,<br />
why not? But that wasn't Atari's way of doing things, as you well<br />
know.<br />
<br />
In any event, they went through those stages. As a new one came<br />
along, the other one died off. That though then affected the<br />
magazines, Creative Computing, we came from the pre-era, in a<br />
sense. From the education applications and people having access to<br />
small, minicomputer time sharing systems. When Altair basic was<br />
announced, then it was the obvious thing that we would port over<br />
programs to that.<br />
<br />
Other magazines such as "Byte" and some of the hardware magazines,<br />
they really came from the HAM radio end of things. Wayne Green, who<br />
started "Byte," was publishing "73," which was the biggest magazine<br />
in HAM radio. HAM fests were one of the earliest places where<br />
computers were, or at least hardware, do-it-yourself computers were<br />
really seen and popularized. Wasn't till a little later that we had<br />
computer festivals.<br />
<br />
The real early computer festivals in '75, '76, had a big overlap<br />
with Ham radio. The early ones in New Jersey. That was the earliest<br />
ones. It was, I think, more, not more, but at least half was<br />
oriented to Ham radio. Then, it broadened out, of course, with more<br />
applications being reproduced. Anyway, I think it's kind of<br />
important to know how things fit into that whole scheme of things.<br />
<br />
Magazines either came from the Ham radio and hardware side of<br />
things. They had a different perspective than those like Creative<br />
Computing.<br />
<br />
Well, Peoples' Computer Company, Bob Aldberg, could have had a real<br />
winning magazine, but he was too much in the alternative mode. So,<br />
Peoples' Computer Company never really made it as a magazine. He<br />
didn't want to do advertising or anything that would...<br />
<br />
Kevin: That was a different avenue. It was more like a tabloid-style<br />
newspaper.<br />
<br />
David: Newspaper, yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was more glossy.<br />
<br />
David: Exactly.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It was a very different field.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Again, magazine publishing. I remember, early on, I was on a<br />
TV show. McNeil Lehrer Report on Public Broadcasting. Life Magazine<br />
was being re-launched and Time-Warner was spending a ton of money<br />
on this re-launch. They had the publisher of Life Magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was probably Time-Life back then. I don't think it...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. That's right. It wasn't Time. Well, I think it was close to<br />
the time that they merged. Anyway. Yeah. It was Time-Life. Then,<br />
they had me. Sort of the opposite extreme.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You're going to be covered in cat hair by the time you're here.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, I am sure.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sorry.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It's OK. But it matches and sort of goes with it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. It matches fine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You have kind of a theme here. The black and white.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes. Yes. Sorry to interrupt.<br />
<br />
David: Anyway, they were interviewing both of us. They were going to spend<br />
more money on their first issue than our entire annual budget, for<br />
everything. The difference in big publishers, because we we're<br />
talking about that a little bit yesterday, is huge. Really huge.<br />
Now, the interesting thing is there was a magazine back then. I<br />
don't know if it's still around today, called Folio. It was a<br />
magazine for magazine publishers. They covered all aspects of it.<br />
Subscription fulfillment, typesetting and everything else and the<br />
business aspects of running a magazine.<br />
<br />
They had some figures, which were true for a long period of time.<br />
That one out of seven magazine startups makes it for one year. One<br />
out of seven. That's low. Of those, one out of seven makes it for<br />
five years. So, were talking about...<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think Wayne told me almost the exact same statistic.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. One out of 50 new magazines makes it for five years or more.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: Once you make it five years, you're probably good to go for awhile.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
The new Life Magazine comes back, roaring back in. Where are they<br />
today, or even 10 years later from that point. Gone. Didn't make<br />
it. In any event, yesterday we were talking a little bit about<br />
where did we put all our money.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
David: Well, all our money wasn't an awful lot compared to big publishers.<br />
We were a small player. We're big in that field, but...<br />
<br />
Kevin: You're a big fish in a little bowl.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Yeah. There wasn't a lot. Betsy reminded me this morning that<br />
one of the things we did to, in a sense, keep control, is we bought<br />
our own typesetting equipment.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Used of course.<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Used.<br />
<br />
David: Used. Yes. We didn't want to send stuff out to a typesetter<br />
where...what did you [inaudible 00:14:22] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was the same thing with the fulfillment. You are sending it to a<br />
service that gives your work to a minimum wage person who couldn't<br />
care less. Puts her time in and...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Plus you still had code and things that needed to be done right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Done right. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Otherwise it was useless.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. We didn't typeset the code usually. We would actually pace<br />
down the printouts. Part of it was for efficiency and probably, in<br />
the long run, it was cheaper. Just to turn your typesetting around,<br />
send it out and wait for your galleys to come back. Then you<br />
proofread them. Then you'd send it back. Then they make the<br />
corrections maybe and you get it back again. So we said, well...and<br />
then we got this used, copy graphic was it?<br />
<br />
David: Mm-hmm. Yep.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Typesetter. Found a young woman who knew typesetting and hired her.<br />
We bought our own stat camera. We always used to have to send all<br />
the stats and [inaudible 00:15:34] out to be made.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: That was huge then before...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Had our own darkroom.<br />
<br />
David: ...everything was computerized publishing. Yeah. We had our own<br />
darkroom and our own stat camera with the thing that goes over a<br />
screen basically to make it into dots.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: To do that. To make those negatives or [inaudible 00:15:56] , which<br />
are the positive. That was something again. You sent it out and you<br />
get it back.<br />
I said, "Oh, you know what, we got a little more type here than<br />
expected. We want to crop this. Well, we send it out again, and oh<br />
my gosh." Doing all of that in-house, but it cost money. In a<br />
sense, just for the hardware and capital improvements that you<br />
needed to do that.<br />
<br />
We were spending it on that and expansion into other things like<br />
the software. One of the other ones that I was thinking of that we<br />
did, that certainly, really didn't bring us any tangible reward,<br />
was that we were doing some consulting when we started developing<br />
software. We started doing consulting to places like the<br />
Exploratorium in San Francisco. And Sesame Place. That was a big<br />
one for us.<br />
<br />
Sesame Place was a theme park right in our own backyard in New<br />
Jersey. They were going to have these terminals that you could go<br />
up to. One of the programs was Mix and Match the Muppets. You could<br />
take different parts of Muppets and combine them. We wrote a part<br />
of that routine and a whole bunch of stuff that made computers and<br />
these things not computers but approachable things for kids.<br />
<br />
We did some work for the Capital Children's Museum in Washington<br />
and Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Again, did it help us?<br />
Maybe. Did we gain a little reputation? Maybe. Did it translate to<br />
the bottom line? Probably not. As Betsy said, it was fun for you to<br />
do that, wasn't it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, it was fun. It gave him fun things to do.<br />
<br />
David: That was one way that we, in a sense, spent some money.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It makes sense. You guys were the computer experts, probably by<br />
orders of magnitude. Who are they going to go to?<br />
<br />
David: That's right. Interactive games, yeah. I already had a good selling<br />
book out there that was visible, known. We did a lot of that kind<br />
of stuff. Some of it was just fun to do. Another place where we put<br />
I won't say a lot of money but we went to a lot of these shows,<br />
well, there were some that were strictly personal computer shows,<br />
but then also tried to push into things like the consumer<br />
electronics show.<br />
We were the only magazine at the consumer electronics. That's a<br />
huge, huge show. Twice a year, one in Chicago and one in Las Vegas.<br />
We'd take the smallest booth that you could but, still, it was a<br />
fair chunk of change to go to that, but that's how I felt we got<br />
the reach. They were pushing at a lower level. That was video games<br />
mostly at that point. Although we weren't in that market, I just<br />
felt that that was someplace that we wanted to be.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you think that was worthwhile?<br />
<br />
David: I don't know. We were mainly looking for retail stores to sell the<br />
magazine. That was my main purpose for going there. No, it probably<br />
wasn't. It probably was not and it cost us a lot of money to go to<br />
the shows. You have to experiment and do those things. We started<br />
reporting on new developments at the consumer electronics show and<br />
there was some overlap with Computer Inc but it was mostly video<br />
games. No, it didn't have a real good payoff. [laughs]<br />
Then there was the Boston show we went to where Betsy's feistiness<br />
really came out. You go to those shows. I'm not talking about one<br />
of these local computer shows or something. You go to a big show.<br />
You've got to use union labor. We had a computer at our booth. We<br />
wanted to plug it in. You're going to plug in your computer? No,<br />
you can't plug it in. You've got to hire an electrician for an hour<br />
for $75 to plug in your computer.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was a bit extreme. I don't think that was actually true.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know how much it was but you had to use union labor for<br />
different things. Betsy took exception to that at one show and<br />
actually came to blows.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was carrying stuff off the show floor. We were trying to get out.<br />
It was in Boston and we were going to drive back and we were trying<br />
to...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Go home at the end of the show?<br />
<br />
Betsy: ...go home at the end of the show. We were just carrying our<br />
cartons of leftover magazines and books and some union guy comes to<br />
me and starts telling me you can't do this and he was being very<br />
rude. So I punched him in the arm. [laughs] They were not happy.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you have to hire a special punching person to do that?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yes, exactly. I should have consulted with the shop steward before<br />
doing that.<br />
<br />
David: There was a follow-up to that. I'm not absolutely sure but I think<br />
the guy that was running that show was Shelley Adelman. He then<br />
approached us after that little incident. You can't do this. Betsy<br />
was really in his face about come on. We're a tiny little nit. Sure<br />
we can do it. We can carry our own stuff.<br />
Shelley Adelman, whose name you probably heard today, in a sense,<br />
got his start by running these smaller shows around the country and<br />
then he built up to running PC Expo in New York and Las Vegas and<br />
then he got into you run a show in Las Vegas you've got to make<br />
deals with the hotels and so on.<br />
<br />
The earlier PC shows in Las Vegas did not use the convention<br />
center. They were held in I think probably the Hilton. He got to<br />
know hotel people there and he started buying into hotels and today<br />
Shelley Adelman is huge. Not Caesars but he owns one of the really<br />
big casino operations. He's on Forbes list of top 100 wealthiest<br />
Americans.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm sure he only uses union labor.<br />
<br />
David: I'm sure he does, absolutely. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's how he got where he is.<br />
<br />
David: We've crossed paths with some interesting people in different ways.<br />
There was another one I was thinking of. Actually, this is jumping<br />
around a little bit. Editorial, in different people submitting<br />
articles and then some people I would ask would you do something<br />
for us early, early on. That's another thing we went to. I went to<br />
comic cons and the sci-fi cons to promote the magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was early.<br />
<br />
David: That was early, very early. I've got to tell you one little<br />
incident there. I also went to small press publisher conventions. I<br />
went to one over Labor Day weekend, and I don't know what year it<br />
was. It was probably '75, '76 maybe. The place that they gave this<br />
small press to exhibit was one platform up in the subway under<br />
Lincoln Center.<br />
Lincoln Center, of course, huge, but down one level is not shops.<br />
There may be a few shops but it was a big, open platform. That's<br />
where we were exhibiting. I had my magazines out there on a table<br />
and I was talking to these other underground publishers and so on,<br />
typical.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's why they put you there. It's underground.<br />
<br />
David: Underground, yes. It was a Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Saturday,<br />
Sunday, Monday. I said, "I can't be here on Sunday." Talked to the<br />
person next to me and I said, "I'm just going to leave a cigar box<br />
that says put your money in the box." He said, "You're nuts. We're<br />
in a New York subway system. You're going to come back with nothing<br />
in your box." I left a bunch of change in it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: And your ex-wife said you were too trusting.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] Yes. I left like 15 single dollar bills in there so people<br />
could make change and I just left it there, from Saturday to Monday<br />
and I came back Monday, about $40, $50 in the box. I don't know<br />
whether it paid for everything that was taken but it worked out<br />
fine. Yes, I was obviously too trusting, but at roughly the same<br />
time there was something going on. I think it was a sci-fi<br />
convention or world future society. Yeah, it was world future<br />
society convention.<br />
They had some notable people there. I was sitting down with Alvin<br />
Toffler in the lobby of the Colosseum and along comes over to us<br />
Isaac [inaudible 00:27:03] . What a wonderful little party. We had<br />
some coffee in the Colosseum and I said, "Isaac, can you write me<br />
an article?" "I got a good story from the iRobot series that hasn't<br />
been widely used or published and you can use that." So I got an<br />
early contribution from Isaac [inaudible 00:27:27] and Alvin<br />
Toffler wrote something for us.<br />
<br />
Anyway, got to know some interesting people at that point. Then who<br />
should submit an article, and by this time Betsy was the editor...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Out of transom comes an article from Michael Creighton. It was a<br />
program. I can't remember what it was about.<br />
<br />
David: For the Apple.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was a program for the Apple, but it was something really dumb.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know if you remember, we were reminded when Harry Garland<br />
was up at the thing in Seattle. Harry Garland was one of the first<br />
ones to produce an independent manufactured a board, a 100 bus<br />
board, for the Altair, and this was really early, and he called it<br />
the TV Dazzler. It made little squares light up but he could make<br />
lots of them light up in different colors or just a few. It was a<br />
silly program but people said we can do graphics on this.<br />
He eventually developed it into quite an interesting graphics tool,<br />
I guess. People did buy the TV Dazzler for itself but the purpose<br />
was here's a board you could produce graphics, do some graphics. In<br />
any event, that's essentially what Michael Creighton's program did<br />
for the Apple. Not much.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This was not early on.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, it was after the Apple 2 was out.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was probably...<br />
<br />
David: '80.<br />
<br />
Betsy: 1980, yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you publish it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. I rejected it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: I'm like we're going to reject an article from Michael Creighton?<br />
<br />
Betsy: We both liked Michael Creighton as an article.<br />
<br />
David: Oh my gosh. But we did. We really did. We had standards.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Later on, though, he wrote something. It was better. It wasn't<br />
great. He did write something better and we did accept it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Orson Scott Card wrote for Compute, I think. I don't know if he was<br />
Orson Scott Card at that point, but [inaudible 00:30:00] .<br />
<br />
David: We've crossed paths with some people.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [inaudible 00:30:09] was actually very nice<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, 6 foot 8, big guy. He was very nice. Unfortunately, he died.<br />
On the other end of things, early on, we really were...this was<br />
probably even before Betsy got in...kind of in the small press<br />
underground publishing movement as much as in the legitimate big<br />
magazines, because that's kind of where I started.<br />
<br />
Betsy: When I came, we had just published the first sleek, coated paper<br />
magazine and coated stock. In October 1978, I believe, that was<br />
published. That was the first of the coated stock. That was kind of<br />
the bridge to legitimacy.<br />
<br />
David: For the first two years, [inaudible 00:31:09] news print and I had<br />
a little tie in with some of the small press people. I was learning<br />
about publishing from small press review, I got to know some of the<br />
people who were doing successful publishing. A lot of them were<br />
magazines and comics out of San Francisco.<br />
So I got to know a little bit [inaudible 00:31:46] and Gilbert<br />
Shelton and Sherry Flannigan, and some of those early, Bobby<br />
London. So anyway, one ad we ran real early on was an adaptation of<br />
Renee and Robert Crompton. Go ahead and change my thing to creative<br />
computing. Go for it. Sherry Flannigan she did a comic strip called<br />
Tronch and Bonnie, Tronch was a little dog and Bonnie was a little<br />
girl and they occasionally got mixed up with a robot dog.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there some sort of falling out with that person?<br />
<br />
David: With Sherry? No. I'm still friends with her on Facebook. They had a<br />
major, major problem, she was involved with Gary Hallgrin and I<br />
forget who the publisher was, McNeil, Bobby London. They were the<br />
Air Pirates funniest group that Disney took to task, that caused<br />
the death of a lot of publishing in the underground comics<br />
movement.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I don't understand.<br />
<br />
David: Air Pirates were funny, they were just looking for trouble. They<br />
had Disney characters flying planes and getting into all kinds of<br />
trouble and getting into problems that Disney characters never<br />
would have done, sexual problems as well as just acting badly.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Disney just said, "We can't put up with this." It was an<br />
interesting case, because was it a copyright violation, not really<br />
because they were character look-a-likes, but they weren't calling<br />
them Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck but they looked the same or very<br />
similar. But, it was a landmark case in underground comics, it<br />
caused a lot of them to pull back, a lot on the satire and stuff<br />
that they were publishing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I asked about Sherry because a number of years ago when I had first<br />
put the best of [inaudible 00:34:29] on my website, then after a<br />
while I got an email saying, "Look, you have to take this<br />
[inaudible 00:34:37] ." I would copyright all, it was just like<br />
waving arms. So I took it down but it was, I thought, maybe it<br />
was...<br />
<br />
David: Well that whole copyright trademark thing, there interpretation<br />
that really, really strict...everything that goes on the Internet<br />
is a public domain. Well, that is not really true either. Are you<br />
making money from copyrighted material? If you are then that's a<br />
pretty clear violation. Are you affecting the copyright owners<br />
ability to make money with it? That's a violation.<br />
I'm kind of in this right now with Uruguay and TinTin, those books<br />
have inspired a lot of people to make parodies and fake TinTin<br />
covers. TinTin at the beach, places TinTin wouldn't normally go.<br />
Well is it affecting the sales of TinTin books, or is it actually<br />
increasingly them?<br />
<br />
Casterman, who owns and [inaudible 00:36:07] owns the TinTin<br />
copyrights. They are really going after some of these people, but<br />
I'm not sure that they have a really good case. So some people take<br />
everything off and don't want nothing on the website. And others<br />
are saying, "Hey, this is legitimate." I have collected a lot of<br />
those covers, and put them up on a website.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I guess you'll find out soon enough.<br />
<br />
David: I will find out, soon enough.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They may not be right legally, but how hard do you want to fight<br />
it.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: I think that they have to demonstrate that it's hurting them in<br />
some way. One last thing, from the question you asked yesterday,<br />
back to the money issue, when I sold the magazine, right at that<br />
time I took 15 percent of what I had received, and donated it to<br />
charities. I have in a sense signed on, although not as an official<br />
signee to the Gates-Buffet initiative to give away half of my<br />
wealth, while I am alive.<br />
At one point in time you can compute that, I have already given<br />
away more than I have received for Creative Computing to Charity.<br />
Of course, it had grown a little bit and we made reasonably decent<br />
investments and that is why it continued to grow. But, I'm really<br />
committed to doing that. My kids are not going to inherit it all.<br />
That's just the way it is, that is the way I believe. Put my money<br />
where my heart is. Anyway,<br />
<br />
Kevin: Other question is, you said something yesterday, I should follow up<br />
that one. You said something about stealing Basic.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well there was this big thing. Just the night before last, at this<br />
dinner we went to, where all the people who were at the first MITS<br />
conference and they referred to the letter that Bill Gates wrote.<br />
<br />
Kevin: "Why are you stealing my software?"<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well exactly. That was just a reference to that Bill Gates, which<br />
had just been brought back to my memory by that. People were<br />
telling stories at this. Instead of having an after dinner speaker<br />
they were just passing the mic around and people were talking about<br />
incidents and things from the past.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did you get to sell the story to this group of...?<br />
<br />
David: Not really, I was just followed up on something [inaudible<br />
00:39:24] .<br />
<br />
Betsy: Some of those stories were really boring.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: Oh yeah, long and boring. It's an interesting thing though, about<br />
basic itself, but it was developed at an educational institution<br />
originally by Kemeny and Kurtz at Dartmouth. And they, either<br />
deliberately or because they had gotten a lot of grant money from<br />
General Electric in the early time sharing systems, they basically<br />
let anybody use their Basic.<br />
It was developed at Dartmouth but later Honeywell put a system in<br />
at Minnesota or Florida or someplace else. They could use Basic,<br />
they could have a no license fee or anything. That made Basic a<br />
universal language that was available, at least that version of<br />
Basic. If you write a different version of Basic, where does that<br />
fall? These are some sort of violation and you need some<br />
permission. And basically Kemeny and Kurtz said, "No, you don't."<br />
And they allowed Basic to be used and developed by others.<br />
<br />
Digital Equipment, at the same time, maybe even earlier, but<br />
roughly the same time, had developed also an interactive language<br />
called Focal. And Focal in many regards was more efficient than<br />
Basic, because they were running it on many computer and there was<br />
less memory to work with. On the other hand, and this was true<br />
Digital...as time went on, they said, "No, nobody can use Focal. We<br />
are not going to let, especially those people [inaudible 00:41:59]<br />
." But any place else, nobody could use Focal.<br />
<br />
I think it wound up with a situation like Sony and Betamax. Sony<br />
saying, "Betamax is ours and it is a better format that VHS," which<br />
it was. But then, JVC saying, "We have VHS and Toshiba. Hey do you<br />
want to use it? Fine, we'll license it to you for next to nothing."<br />
<br />
Kevin: You think Focal could have been Basic.<br />
<br />
David: I think it could have been very big. I think it could there could<br />
have been very serious competition between the two languages, but<br />
by Digital limiting it only to their own computers and specifically<br />
to their mini computers, not even the big mainframes, it really<br />
limited the spread of Focal. In fact, it forced me to go out to the<br />
developers and people in educational institutions they wanted<br />
Basic.<br />
There were few schools and colleges in Boston area, near Deck that<br />
were OK with Focal. But stuff was getting published by Minnesota<br />
Educational Computer Consortium and others in Basic, [inaudible<br />
00:43:32] computer project. So they wanted Basic. [laughs] I had to<br />
go on. I hired one group, actually it turned out to be just an<br />
individual guy in Brooklyn that developed a Basic for 4KPDP8. Well<br />
Basic took 3.5K, I gave you 500 words, 512 bit not even the 16 bit,<br />
at least get 2 bits per...but 500 words the right programs. Wasn't<br />
much.<br />
<br />
So that forced Lunar Lander and [inaudible 00:44:15] and some of<br />
those programs actually. Some of them I imported over from Focal<br />
into Basic. And then we had a machine that had 8K. We had a<br />
different version of Basic because Hewlett Packard had a machine<br />
that read cards, mark sense cards. We had to have a different<br />
version of basic for that. Then we had a timeshare Basic. We had<br />
six versions of Basic, five actually on the PDP8 family. It was<br />
absurd, it was crazy, but we had to do it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I was going to ask you, the process of like...you started<br />
saying...you interrupted yourself. You said, "People would submit<br />
articles and then..." I don't know what you were going to say next.<br />
But [inaudible 00:45:08] that I wanted to ask you like just the<br />
process of how the magazine got made. You got an article was,<br />
somebody just typed up or something and...<br />
<br />
Betsy: You mean the mechanics of the production?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We can receive most of the articles for the magazine came over the<br />
transom. And we would get these articles and our editorial system<br />
would log them in and pass them around to editorial staff. John<br />
Anderson and Russell [inaudible 00:45:42] .<br />
<br />
David: Peter Fee.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Peter Fee.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What does it mean over the transom?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Means they weren't solicited. Somebody in the middle of the night<br />
jumped to know [laughs] or through the mailbox. We put a little<br />
piece of paper on there and the guys would write their opinions.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] That is serious.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Some of the things they said. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Like what? What would they say?<br />
<br />
Betsy: "Don't quit your day job." [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: And then they had the rubber stamp.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Somebody found a stamp. Everything that we had was used, including<br />
our desk and everything. And somebody found, at the back of the<br />
desk, a stamp. It said San Marcos on it. This was like the ultimate<br />
insult. [laughs] San Marcos, like you know, "Get out of here."<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Send it to San Marcos?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Send it to San Marcos, wherever that was. Ultimately, I would make<br />
the final decision whether we were going to publish this or not.<br />
Once we were well established, the vast majority of them went back.<br />
We never returned manuscripts. And they would come with piles of<br />
code. A lot of them were programs and, we would decide and the<br />
editorial assistants job to notify the person. Then we bought all<br />
rights, didn't we?<br />
<br />
David: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
Betsy: North American Serial rights, that's what we bought for everything.<br />
Then they would go into a cube. Sometimes we would say something,<br />
"Oh, this is going to go really well with this educational<br />
institute that we're doing in June," Like that one is for June or<br />
just put it in the queue and we will see when it comes or rises to<br />
the top or whatever.<br />
The more technical editors like, John Anderson, he was our best guy<br />
ever. They would go through the code and make sure the code worked,<br />
and I would edit them for content and correct them.<br />
<br />
David: For English and Grammar.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, with a pen and pencil. Then they would go to our typesetter.<br />
Typesetter would correct them. And then they would come back, and I<br />
think, our lower level editorial assistant would proofread them,<br />
but proofread a lot of them too. When they came out typesetter, it<br />
was on a smooth shiny paper.<br />
<br />
David: Photographic paper.<br />
<br />
Betsy: And then, if they had screenshots or anything the art department<br />
would make them into photo stats or [inaudible 00:49:02] . And then<br />
when it was time for them to go to press they would put them on<br />
boards, pieces of cardboard, white paper...<br />
<br />
Kevin: So you paste up?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, they do the paste up and put it on there.<br />
<br />
David: The boards were using non reproducing blue on its photograph. They<br />
had different outlines, blue defined columns, both two and three<br />
column pages and upper limits and page numbers and all that kind of<br />
stuff.<br />
<br />
Kevin: We were still doing it on [inaudible 00:49:43] newspaper in 1990.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well that's exactly it, so you know what we're talking about. And<br />
then once you get it all together and then again somebody has got<br />
to read it to make sure there is no lines left out, particularly of<br />
the programs. Make sure that those all still make sense. There were<br />
many cases where line got left out or artists cuts off a things and<br />
realizes, "Oh, I mean to cut it short." And that whole line<br />
disappears and then you send it off to be printed and all the<br />
subscribers get a little upset because Startrek doesn't run.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: So that sort of thing happened frequently or often?<br />
<br />
David: With typeset material, not much at all. But with program listings,<br />
program listings were really tough. Because you would have people<br />
that would submit something, and they'd have a really cheap, low-<br />
end dot matrix printer. And we always encouraged people, if you're<br />
going to submit a program, submit it in some machine-readable form.<br />
So we don't want to type them all in to make sure they work. Even<br />
though our readers are going to have to, but we don't want to have<br />
to do that. So send us. But even so, we might then print it off on<br />
one of our slightly higher end printers. But I'll tell you what,<br />
you have page breaks and everything else. And the Art department<br />
didn't have a clue about programs and stuff. The program would get<br />
stated down. We weren't using the full sized type for program<br />
listings.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. At that point we hadn't the ability to make them fit.<br />
<br />
David: That's where the most common place that you'd lose a line or<br />
something. It would get photographed, and when it's coming out of a<br />
line printer, you might have one or two lines on the following<br />
page. "Oh, we forgot that."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Personally, I know it said so much about magazine that when it<br />
continued, there were just sometimes a handwritten area going,<br />
"Continued over here." [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Oh, absolutely.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That was a early.<br />
<br />
Kevin: It wasn't professional, and that was awesome. It was just like,<br />
"OK."<br />
<br />
Betsy: Then what we would do, we would request when we...we would solicit<br />
articles. Like if there was a new Apple peripheral that we wanted<br />
to review, we'd get the product. Then a lot of times, our own guys<br />
wanted to review the stuff, but if it was something that we didn't<br />
have time for, or that was better suited to one of our freelancers,<br />
we would send it out and ask for a review of it.<br />
A lot of reviews came in over the transom too, but we tried to be<br />
careful of those, that they were not either trying to justify their<br />
own purchase of whatever it was or get even with the publisher for<br />
producing it. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Or written by the... [crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: That really wasn't an issue at the time, it was a more innocent<br />
time. That really didn't happen much, but it was, sometimes, people<br />
would get a product they didn't care for and totally bash it, then<br />
we have to go and figure out is it really that bad. We tend to not<br />
produce seriously negative...if it was a really bad product we just<br />
ignored it.<br />
<br />
David: We tried to be objective with reviews, but before I got into the<br />
computer field at all I was in market research. There are a number<br />
of biases, too, that really overwhelmingly affect all kinds of<br />
market research polls or surveys. One is that people think they're<br />
better than they are. For example, if we were doing a poll or a<br />
research study, we'd put a question on basically designed to show<br />
the executives who were using this data that there were some<br />
biases.<br />
<br />
Betsy: He's not talking about Creative Computing.<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
David: No, no. This was way earlier. I'm talking about Proctor and Gamble<br />
products or general foods or that kind of thing. Anyways, the<br />
question we put on was "please rank your driving ability," and we<br />
had from well below average, accident waiting to happen up to Mario<br />
Andretti, Danica Patrick, over there. And you know what, 99 percent<br />
of the population ranked themselves better than the average. Where<br />
is your average then? Its way high.<br />
The other thing, equally pervasive in a sense, is that people<br />
wanted to justify a decision, a purchase decision. In fact, back<br />
the 30s, the slogan for Ford Motor Company was ask a man that owns<br />
one. You ask a man that owns and has made a decision to buy this<br />
car, he's going to say "Yeah, it is the greatest car." So you put<br />
on questions, again, throwaway questions.<br />
<br />
If you had this, or if you were an owner of whatever car it is that<br />
you have. "What do you have now? Would you buy another one?" People<br />
"Oh, yes. This is a great decision. I love this car." I'll tell you<br />
where you can find out, is you look at what percentage of people<br />
that did own that particular car did buy another one? They're<br />
always way lower than they those that say they would buy another<br />
one. It gets more pronounced with higher prices.<br />
<br />
If you've made a decision to buy a high-priced car, you're going to<br />
think, "I'll tell you what. This Land Rover was the best car I have<br />
ever bought." 78 percent of people might say, "I'm going to buy<br />
another one." About 15 percent of the people actually do.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So [inaudible 00:56:49] magazine because people want to justify a<br />
review.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. That's exactly right. And as Betsy said, it could go the<br />
other way, too. "I think I'm getting screwed here with this product<br />
and I'm going to knock it." When you get reviews, in essence, over<br />
the transom, they're either justifying, "This was really wonderful.<br />
I made a great decision buying this particular product," or "I hate<br />
it." It's hard to know whether the review was really objective and<br />
realistic.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you ever push-back from advertisers?<br />
<br />
David: All the time.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Can you tell me?<br />
<br />
Betsy: We would feel the pushback from our ad sales people. They would say<br />
"So and so is annoyed with you because you didn't put it." We very<br />
rarely put anybody's totally negative reviews, but we tried to be<br />
objective, and not every product is perfect. Almost every product<br />
is going to have some negative feature.<br />
We would put those in and the advertisers would then go to their ad<br />
rep and complain. Then the ad rep would come to us and say, "Why<br />
are you doing this? These people are mad. I have to sell them ads."<br />
We would just say "Separation of church and State. You are<br />
advertising in this magazine because it's a credible magazine, and<br />
if we let you push us around, it won't be credible anymore, and<br />
then it will reflect on your ad."<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do you remember anyone ever pulling ads [inaudible 00:58:39] ?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't, offhand. Do you?<br />
<br />
David: No, but I can tell you the opposite. There were a couple of<br />
magazines that almost ran manufactured press releases as product<br />
reviews. They did get more advertising than we did from some<br />
manufacturers that liked that. I hate to name names, but Compute<br />
Magazine. I don't think you'll find any negative reviews in Compute<br />
Magazine. Everything was the greatest thing since sliced bread.<br />
Personal Computing, similar, very positive. "Gee whiz" reviews on<br />
almost all the things that they saw. It just isn't that way.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You have talked about [inaudible 00:59:49] . We've talked briefly<br />
at least about the other magazines. Sync, the one about Timex<br />
Sinclair. I understand the allure of publishing a magazine geared<br />
to a specific system, but why did you pick Timex Sinclair? [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Probably two reasons. One is that we had more of a presence in<br />
England than most of the other magazines.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Still do.<br />
<br />
David: We had a very early agreement with David Tebbet, who was the co-<br />
publisher of Personal Computer, something-or-other. It might have<br />
been Personal Computer World. Yes, it was.<br />
<br />
Betsy Ahi: Yes it was Personal Computer World, and when PC world started they<br />
had to call it PC World because there was already a Personal<br />
Computer World in England.<br />
<br />
David: And we had an agreement that they would reprint materials from<br />
Creative Computing, which they did for a while but then they<br />
developed their own in-house capabilities and there was enough<br />
differences. We went to England and very early on had an agent in<br />
England that we could take subscriptions.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A housewife who kept her dark issues in her spare bathroom.<br />
[laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we still know her. Hazel Greaves, Hazy. Anyway, so we were<br />
getting enough subscriptions from England. We were sending over, I<br />
don't know how they packaged them up, but they call them Mbags, M-<br />
bags, mail bags basically of magazines, then we mail them from<br />
England. So I had more of our connection with British market than<br />
probably any of the other magazines, we definitely did.<br />
And so I get to know Clarkson Clair and what's going on over there.<br />
And then when they bring over the computer to this country and<br />
Timex, my God, big outfit. They were going to market it. By that<br />
time you know, there was no point starting a [inaudible 01:02:25]<br />
magazine or an entire magazine. They were, Or Apple, they were<br />
already existed. So maybe this is going to be the next big one. We<br />
will be right there when they start and we were.<br />
<br />
Timex actually put, what we had simple, simple sink or something<br />
but it was in the package with the computer. So that was one way of<br />
getting our subscriber base and we couldn't possibly afford to<br />
advertise and do direct mailings for magazine like that. But they<br />
were in essence helping us go on. So that's why it is pretty<br />
successful actually. Often, we were making money on the magazine<br />
mainly because we didn't have to promote it.<br />
<br />
If we had to get subscriptions, we could not have possibly made it<br />
work. There wasn't enough advertising really. I don't know what the<br />
issue here was, but it was not as good as we would have liked it.<br />
The magazine would have been tiny if we maintained the same<br />
advertising to edit ratio we would have liked. But we didn't lose<br />
money out of it but we didn't make anything out of it either. I<br />
think it was a breakeven proposition.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. Microsystems. [inaudible 01:04:09] .<br />
<br />
David: I said there was a lot of early development in New Jersey and there<br />
was a guy named Saul Libes, you will find him probably, [laughs]<br />
who was the first president of the Armature Computer Group in New<br />
Jersey. He was a Professor at [inaudible 01:04:43] College and he<br />
felt that Byte magazine started out fine but then they were<br />
focusing more on assembled hardware and things that were already<br />
made.<br />
So he wanted to get down on really lower level of do it yourself,<br />
build it yourself. Microsystems was more like Byte was in the very<br />
beginning, focusing on circuit diagram, this was logic in PC's and<br />
everything.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There first name was S100, Microsystems<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, S100 perhaps then it became Microsystems in '78 or '79. When<br />
some of the others came out they started [inaudible 01:05:45] 6800<br />
and 68,000 chips from Motorola. But I would say it was a really<br />
techy magazine and it was one that I think probably killed that one<br />
off.<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was dead before [inaudible 01:06:05] . [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: It might have been. I don't know, but it was...<br />
<br />
Betsy: S100 bus did not survive and to the [inaudible 01:06:12] .<br />
<br />
David: It was dead before as there was these eras and the do it yourself<br />
S100 era,that was '75 to '78. Then it kind of had a downward spiral<br />
of two or three years and it was gone. Well, maybe it wasn't gone<br />
but it wasn't the same. And so Microsystems was tuned into that and<br />
they were running hardcore stuff.<br />
And the reason that Saul...we reach an agreement with him to<br />
publish it, is basically he didn't have any real magazine<br />
background. We thought we could do something with it. It turned out<br />
not to be a good fit bit we published it for a while. I don't know<br />
if we made money or lost money on that. Probably it didn't make<br />
anything. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Small business computers or computing.<br />
<br />
David: What?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Small business computers? Who do we buy that from? I can't even<br />
remember. You can't even remember that we had it, I can tell by the<br />
look on your face<br />
<br />
David: I can<br />
<br />
Betsy: That one of my brothers...my brother was a publisher remember?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I don't know who or where we got it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That just fall into grave or...?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Eventually, but that we post it for a while. I think is something<br />
that somebody basically left on our door step.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think it was kind of like a puppy on the... [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: I think it came with your brother.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, because my brother wasn't into publishing until after clearing<br />
college.<br />
<br />
David: It sounded like a good idea at the time.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think we saw a future in business computing<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, we did and unfortunately that was one word as if they just<br />
want...I mentioned yesterday that they wanted to really shift the<br />
focus of Creative Computing away from home and broaden out and<br />
shifted into the small business market. And just did not, it was an<br />
uncomfortable fit. We would've been better to have a separate<br />
magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember where we got Small Business Computing from or<br />
where it went.<br />
<br />
David: I don't know, either.<br />
<br />
Betsy: But I know that obviously it wasn't a huge acquisition.<br />
<br />
David: It was a footnote.<br />
<br />
Betsy: A footnote in the story. [laughs]<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Actually, a bigger acquisition was earlier and that was Rom<br />
Magazine. Rom was published by who?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Erik Sandberg-Diment.<br />
<br />
David: Right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: D-I-M-E-N-T.<br />
<br />
David: Connecticut. He did a nice job with the magazine, very nice job<br />
with it. Published nine issues and a little different focus than<br />
Creative but it really overlapped us very nicely. He had more<br />
graphic stuff. In fact, it was through him that I got to know<br />
George Baker and some of the people up there. The other guy that<br />
did the pixelated blocks photos. You've seen those.<br />
<br />
Betsy: The Einstein.<br />
<br />
David: [crosstalk] The Lincoln with block pics.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Block pics.<br />
<br />
David: Block pics. OK, he and George Baker sort of came as a package with<br />
Rom, they knew of each other. We actually, I would say, four or<br />
five issues, ran Rom as a whole separate section and even set it on<br />
the cover of Creative Computing and Rom. Then it became evident...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think that was because he had a whole other editorial kicking<br />
around. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: We bought.<br />
<br />
David: Could be. And then we would just merge it in completely, but that<br />
was a very good fit. It brought us more editorial than it did<br />
subscribers. They did not have a big subscriber base, but it was a<br />
nice marriage in a sense.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Video and Arcade Games only published I think four issues.<br />
<br />
David: Three.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Three?<br />
<br />
David: Actually, three but if you've got a hold of the third one, you're<br />
doing well. I think Ziff cut that off after two real issues got<br />
mailed out. We did a third one but it wasn't sent out to<br />
subscribers.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My website only has two issues.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. There were only two that really were distributed.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So I have...<br />
[crosstalk]<br />
<br />
Betsy: A goal. [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, if you can get a hold of the third one. [laughter] I don't<br />
even have that. There's a same thing on Tarry-on. There were three<br />
issues of Tarry-on that I did not keep the third issue. Oh, man.<br />
Shoot me.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: But Video and Arcade Games, there were at least five or six other<br />
magazines focusing on that. Talk about magazines that were running<br />
non-objective manufacture-provided reviews, all the others were. I,<br />
maybe, convinced myself and some people at Davis that there was a<br />
need for really objective...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ziff? Did Ziff do that?<br />
<br />
David: Huh?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Were we with Ziff when we did that?<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah. That was a late one. So we said, let's...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Continue it through.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, that was definitely. Let's do it. But again...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not only that but it was going to be fun.<br />
<br />
David: It was going to be a lot of fun. [laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: So why did it fail?<br />
<br />
David: OK, again you got to look at the eras and what was happening.<br />
Arcade games then really were on the decline. Video arcades where<br />
you go in and pop a quarter in, because there was so much more<br />
capability in the home computers and the [inaudible 01:12:55] and<br />
the Mattel and the different home systems. They could do all now,<br />
not as much, but you get a pretty darned good game that you could<br />
take home with you and not have to pop a quarter in the slot every<br />
time you play.<br />
So arcade games were kind of on the downward spiral, so that<br />
eliminated a lot of potential advertising. We weren't going to get<br />
any advertising from Nameco and all of the producers of the arcade<br />
games, which was, "Hey, it is advertising along with..." And the<br />
other home producers of the game, there were four or five magazines<br />
already that they were pouring money into. They didn't really want<br />
another one.<br />
<br />
So it was advertising that or just lack of advertising that killed<br />
that off. We just couldn't get it. I think there was still a need<br />
for what we had sort of in a sense proposed to do of objectively<br />
reviewing games and secondly, we're telling people how to play<br />
them.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, it was strategies.<br />
<br />
David: Strategies. It was advertising that we just didn't have, couldn't<br />
get.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:14:28] Atari explored and Atari I think we've covered<br />
pretty well.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Military vehicles, which we talked about.<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] Yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So the other magazines, Byte and [inaudible 01:14:45] , was it<br />
rivalry? Was it friendly competition?<br />
<br />
David: Byte, we were in bed together. Not in bed together, but we<br />
published the best of Byte. Creative Computing did.<br />
<br />
Betsy: For awhile.<br />
<br />
David: Well, just one.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No. That wasn't that friendly a rivalry. It wasn't that friendly<br />
after awhile.<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't friendly once they sold to McGraw Hill, and they sold<br />
early. Then everything was off. We did some joint promotions with<br />
Byte for hardware creative software. We ran the ads for each other<br />
for a short time.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's when McGraw Hill cutoff.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] In a heartbeat. No more of that.<br />
<br />
David: We felt that basically we weren't even competing for the same<br />
advertisers. Just a few, but not really. Certainly, we were not in<br />
direct competition at all with Byte. So that was just kind of all<br />
in the same place and you're going in a hardware direction, we're<br />
going on the software.<br />
When Wayne Green threw this intrigue with his wife and everything<br />
else, lost Byte Magazine. He was fit to be tied. "I'm going to kill<br />
them!" and he started Kilobyte. It wasn't killable. It was Kilobyte<br />
for I don't know how many issues.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not many.<br />
<br />
David: 1000 bytes. [laughter] and a kilobyte, it had a dual meaning there.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: That was a ferocious and very nasty. Oh, horrible rivalry. Somebody<br />
early on forced him not to use the name byte at all.<br />
<br />
Betsy: So it was byte.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: So they changed it to Kilobaud.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Which didn't mean anything.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: No.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So did you have a relationship with Wayne?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Nobody had a relationship with... [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: Nobody really had a relationship. I knew him, of course. He was<br />
going his own way. Now the one area actually where we got into more<br />
competition with him than in the magazine itself, because again, he<br />
was trying to be like Byte, hardware oriented and he published 73<br />
magazines so he was basically focusing on the ham radio people, the<br />
do it yourselfers and so on. But they started a software division.<br />
It was pretty good. They had a lot of the same types of software<br />
that we did on cassette tape.<br />
In any event, we really had more of a head to head rivalry on the<br />
software than in the magazine publishing. We never really had<br />
anything to do with the magazine products or books. They also<br />
published some books but more like the magazine hardware type of<br />
thing. We weren't quite as selective, but our book publishing we<br />
did get into things that weren't in the magazine. We published<br />
books with more of a hardware orientation. We had a little broader<br />
line of books than the type of things that we had in the magazine.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I don't know if you want to open this can of worms, but you said to<br />
me in an email, "You couldn't find two people whose vision,<br />
philosophy, ethics, and view of business and life was further apart<br />
than Wayne and I." Can you elaborate on that? [laughs]<br />
<br />
Betsy: He was just basically unpleasant, is my take on him. I didn't know<br />
him that well but it was just sort of like he had a chip on his<br />
shoulder and was daring you to knock it off. Wouldn't you say?<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You knew him before I did but by the time I arrived on the scene<br />
that was just sort of the general industry perception of him, I<br />
think. It was just stay away from him, leave him alone, he's not<br />
very nice.<br />
<br />
David: Well, one other thing, which we sort of touched on a couple of<br />
times, I'm very trusting. [laughter] Overly so, according to my ex-<br />
wife and I think there would be a couple of examples. Wayne would<br />
walk out of that door, boy, out of sight, 'you're going to do<br />
something to screw him' is what his view would be. He did not trust<br />
anybody.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] And least of all, his ex wife.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
David: It's the old saying, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean<br />
that somebody isn't out to get you." He thought everyone was out to<br />
get him, everybody. So we were totally philosophically different.<br />
Our ways of doing business were different. I shake hands with you,<br />
we have an agreement. You don't shake hands with Wayne.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't think his employees were ever happy either.<br />
<br />
David: Oh!<br />
<br />
Betsy: You talked to them and it shows. He didn't have like a great...<br />
<br />
David: Rapport.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well it was not. The culture of his organization I don't think was<br />
particularly, I think it was probably permeated with this lack of<br />
trust.<br />
<br />
David: Well, one thing, we had fun. We really did have fun at Creative<br />
Computing. Perhaps some of the editorial staff, too much. There was<br />
one point where Betsy had to away their...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Well they were all young guys. Some of them even still in high<br />
school, they would play games for hours and hours and hours, long<br />
after the reviews were done. It was one, self-contained thing that<br />
played football, and they played it for hours. I had to take it<br />
away from them. Like "don't make me be your mother"<br />
<br />
Kevin: Was there any drug culture at all? If you read [inaudible 01:22:17]<br />
and he was cocaine and high everyday and popped...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Not that we knew of. [laughs]<br />
<br />
David: The East coast was quite different.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No there was nothing, really. I don't think so. In fact, my client<br />
John Anderson and Peter Fee, they were actually kind of protective<br />
of me in a lot of ways. I can remember being in John's office and<br />
they were talking about a movie or something like that. John said,<br />
"No, you wouldn't like this movie, don't go to this movie." That<br />
kind of thing, they were funny guys. They just kept laughing. David<br />
Lubar. They were free spirits but they were very funny, talented<br />
guys.<br />
<br />
David: He is coming out with a line of children's books, weird, weird<br />
stuff. The last one, something about the lawn mower weenies. He has<br />
a line of 6 or 8, and they're all little short stories. Some of<br />
them were adaptations of stuff that almost got published in<br />
Creative Computing, probably some of them did. Lubar is a funny<br />
guy. When he left and went to work for one of the video gaming<br />
companies, his first big successful game was "Worm Wars." You were<br />
like, "Worm Wars?" [laughs]<br />
Other people are fighting real serious warrior and you are fighting<br />
with worms. We just had a different kind of culture, a lot of fun.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Jonny Anderson went to work for A plus in San Francisco. He was one<br />
of the five people killed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1986.<br />
He was in a car and a piece of the building fell on the car. He was<br />
a really funny guy.<br />
<br />
David: We did not have a serious business culture.<br />
<br />
Betsy: No, we had this great big room with a bunch of tables set up around<br />
the edges, in the middle. It was kind of like that, nowhere near as<br />
neat.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I will clean that up for you.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs] Just tangles of wires, and we had to have one of every<br />
kind of computer so we can test all the software, and this one<br />
would be running this kind of peripheral, and it was like a young<br />
guys dream job.<br />
<br />
David: You commented yesterday about how we had a bunch of high school,<br />
not quite, but still...<br />
<br />
Betsy: I said that they were in their early 20s but they basically had the<br />
maturity of high school students, they needed a little bit of<br />
mothering. But I wasn't that myself. They were just really nice<br />
guys, we did a good job hiring those kids.<br />
<br />
David: When you talk about the Atari cultures and some of the others,<br />
where every Friday some of these companies have parties, that kind<br />
of thing. We had an annual party, a picnic. We didn't need weekly<br />
parties and stuff to let you have fun because that stuff was going<br />
on every day, not really partying but playing the games and<br />
bantering and everything else.<br />
As they say, at Washington, a real efficient business culture.<br />
Heck, I didn't work for Digital Equipment, which was still a pretty<br />
relaxed place, but AT&T which was anything but. This is as far away<br />
from that kind of corporate culture as you can get, but it worked.<br />
Didn't make a lot of money, but it worked.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:26:58]<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah. And I think they appreciated it because they weren't making<br />
tons of money either, but they were having a lot of fun. They<br />
enjoyed going to work, they really enjoyed it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Speaking of Kindle, I've done it but haven't told anybody yet that<br />
best of Creative Computing too is now available on Kindle. And I<br />
have been working backwards. [crosstalk] I just had it on sale.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I haven't publicized it yet for sale.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They won't let you do. [laughs]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah, I think they will have two.<br />
<br />
David: Did you do that through Amazon? How do you convert is to Kindle?<br />
I scan them and then I do CRM and I use Elance or utilize some<br />
service in India that converts it back to ASCII, and then they<br />
convert it into an E-book from there. It's a lot of work, I want it<br />
done well, and I want it to be super awesome. And they just<br />
[inaudible 01:28:40] , like we were talking about before.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Outsourcing and stuff. But I can do it myself but that would take<br />
way too long. So I just try to do the quality control [inaudible<br />
01:28:49] . It's not perfect but better than nothing.<br />
<br />
David: I have reached the point where with my Dodge restoration book, that<br />
yes, many of the borders around the pictures are terrible, they're<br />
hand drawn and so on. But I'm not going to bother to re-do that, I<br />
just want take the book, get it into some sort of machine readable<br />
format, PDF or something. [inaudible 01:29:24] somebody that can...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah, I can get you off with that. We can then figure it out.<br />
<br />
David: I found one extra one that I can cut up.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That will help a lot. [inaudible 01:29:37] . If you want to sell a<br />
PDF of it, that would be up in couple of day. That's easy, but a<br />
searchable Kindle version that takes longer.<br />
<br />
David: I don't want a Kindle version because people want to print out<br />
something that they can...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Take out to the garage<br />
<br />
David: When people slide under the vehicle they have it there, "Oh, OK<br />
this is what I should be looking for."<br />
<br />
Kevin: If you scan it and upload it to Amazon, even create space from<br />
[inaudible 01:30:06] company, then there could actually be another<br />
book, that looks pretty identical to the first one. We will figure<br />
out.<br />
Do you [inaudible 01:30:23] ? But are you familiar with...?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Are there any?<br />
<br />
Kevin: There are but they are very different than Creative.<br />
<br />
David: Somebody out there said, "What did you read today?" The only<br />
magazines that I will occasionally pick up in the computer field<br />
are mostly from England, Internet magazines, well there are<br />
several, which is sort of interesting that the dominant Internet<br />
magazines come from England, but they do.<br />
If I want to do something, and I haven't lately, but I wanted to<br />
get into doing something different or interactive or something with<br />
my website. I'd pick up one of those magazines and kind of have<br />
same kind of thing that Creative used to publish. Here is a code to<br />
do it in Pearl or HTML, whatever.<br />
<br />
I converted all of my website, quite a while ago, to XHTML from old<br />
HTML. I did not like any of the programs that generate web pages,<br />
mainly because...Well, today its probably OK, but I felt that<br />
earlier on, they were very inefficient. You'd have this much code<br />
for something and XHTML would write it in five lines.<br />
<br />
My old-fashioned [inaudible 01:32:23] said, "You know what, the<br />
interpreter or compiler or whatever, has to go through a lot of<br />
that just to pick out what is going to be displayed." My web pages<br />
are very compact and short. They are all XHTML, none of that is<br />
extra [inaudible 01:32:41] style pages and everything else.<br />
<br />
Anyway, so that's what I'll pick up a magazine for. I'm was doing a<br />
little bit of programming in Pearl and then I said, "No. You know<br />
what, I can get routines that I can download and I don't have to<br />
learn it myself. I learned enough to know that I don't want your<br />
Pearl program." [laughs] Or what is the other one? I don't know.<br />
I'm right at the point now where I'm wanting to do some more things<br />
that I can't, so I'll probably purchase some more computer<br />
magazines and learn about it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Has anyone talked to you about the purchase of PC by Davis?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Mm-hmm.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is a big story.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah.<br />
<br />
David: She was involved.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I was involved. There was a magazine called PC. I was in San<br />
Francisco.<br />
<br />
Kevin: PC magazine.<br />
<br />
Betsy: PC Magazine, right. And, there was a guy named Tony Gold and there<br />
was somebody else that I can't remember. There was Tony Gold and<br />
this Mr. X started this magazine and they hired...David Banell will<br />
probably tell you all, I don't know all the details but I'm sure he<br />
has it engraved in his brain.<br />
They hired David Banell to run it and I guess several other people,<br />
and my understanding is, that they told them they were going to<br />
give them a piece of the action, they weren't going to pay them<br />
very much but you're all part owners and everything, but nobody<br />
ever wrote it down.<br />
<br />
So when Ziff Davis approached Tony Gold and Mr. X and wanted to buy<br />
the magazine, and the guys said, "Oh yeah, sure," and they sold it<br />
to him and all these people that were working for them said, "Well,<br />
what about us. We're part owners too." But there was no proof of<br />
it. So Ziff bought it, and they were right in the middle, just<br />
about to go to press with an issue and they got word that it had<br />
been purchased by Ziff.<br />
<br />
So David Banell took just about the entire staff and they walked<br />
out and went across town and started PC World. Apparently their<br />
lawyers said, "Don't take anything with you." So they just walked<br />
out and left the offices as they were, and Ziff, who now had a<br />
magazine to get out and no one to do it, sent me out to San<br />
Francisco for a couple of weeks and there was like an editorial<br />
assistant and a couple of freelance writers, were the only people<br />
left.<br />
<br />
Kevin: So this is when you became the interim.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is how I become the editorial director of PC. So I basically<br />
went out there and walked into this office and had to pull together<br />
their issue and get it off to the printer. They had a big dummy on<br />
the wall where everthing...<br />
<br />
Kevin: They lay all the...<br />
<br />
Betsy: They lay all the impositions where all the pages and the stories<br />
were going to go and they moved everything around. [laughs] But<br />
they couldn't resist.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That is awesome.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This one guy, whose name I wish I could remember. Barry Owen,<br />
worked with me, and we were able to get it off to the printer and<br />
then pack everything up and send it back to New York and then they<br />
hired Barry Owen, he moved to New York and he eventually become the<br />
editor, because that was who they had.<br />
I was sort of the editorial director for a while and they said<br />
that, "If you were going to do this, you would have to come to the<br />
city. We are going to really set up an office here and make it<br />
real." And I said, "No, I am not going to drive into the city every<br />
day or take the train or the bus or anything." It was a interesting<br />
story and we were getting much more interesting version of it from<br />
David Barnell, who was there. [laughs]<br />
<br />
And in the mean time, they were all starting up PC World and taking<br />
all of their freelancers and trying to make it as difficult as<br />
possible for PC. That was a big rivalry, obviously.<br />
<br />
David: And then it created a couple of months of problems at creative too,<br />
because my editor was gone. I had really gotten very dependent to<br />
rely on her for so many things. "I got to edit this myself." And<br />
then the whole question mark was, OK if PC magazine, is she can<br />
stay with it. It was a time of uncertainty.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I'm sure it was a bad career move.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. But PC magazine still exist.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, exactly. I don't know if I would have existed if I had to<br />
commute to New York, that's a nasty commute. Millions of people do<br />
it but, I just didn't want to be one of them. I didn't mean to<br />
interrupt, so back to you.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What are you most proud of, or everything you have done?<br />
<br />
David: OK, that's obviously not a one word answer. Proud is, I am not<br />
crazy about it. I guess the fact that I continued to hear from<br />
people that said, "Hey, I got my start in computing from Basic<br />
computer games or Creative Computing," or something that I had my<br />
hand in, that makes me feel pretty good.<br />
You have a long term, or longer term influence that just what you<br />
do at the time, it's living on. It's not living on forever. Basic<br />
isn't going to live on forever. But I think the idea that having<br />
some positive influence on other people, on their lives, on their<br />
careers, that's a good.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You helped send people into the computer science field.<br />
<br />
David: And you know the specific individual accomplishments. Yeah, I wrote<br />
a couple of programs that are probably in some cases, maybe not the<br />
program but the routines, are still in use. That's minor compared<br />
to having an influence on people and their career and their<br />
outlook, their future. That's way more important. "OK so I wrote a<br />
great algorithm, so what."<br />
<br />
Kevin: And you really think it's the same algorithm that's being used in<br />
Google maps and...<br />
<br />
David: Portions of it, yeah. But that is minor. I look back and I say,<br />
"Almost anything that I wrote in the last 30-40 years, if I were<br />
doing it today, I would have done it a little differently, but I<br />
didn't know then what I know now." So there's no one thing I could<br />
say, "Oh, that was a really great article, or great insight," or<br />
something. Anything can be improved upon.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Sure. That's what disappoints me about computer magazines today is<br />
I don't think that it seems like children going to be able to go.<br />
It's not going to motivate anybody to do anything, other than use<br />
Word version 18 or whatever. There's no Basic programs to type<br />
anymore and it's not exciting.<br />
[cross talk]<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Well, [inaudible 01:42:31] was mentioning that at breakfast,<br />
oh gosh that was just yesterday.<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Betsy: It was yesterday [laughs] .<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] That kids today don't have any feeling about, or I should<br />
say knowledge about the real basics of bits. What is a bit?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Right.<br />
<br />
David: Nobody knows anymore. He wanted to find some little simple piece of<br />
hardware. Really, I guess he has, that every kid when they're in<br />
the 5th or 6th grade will be exposed to this so they'll have some<br />
concept of what bits are all about. Are you ever going to get that<br />
into schools today? No. So anyway, it's just kind of, hopefully<br />
there's been some long term influence.<br />
And what I'm doing now even, which is mainly developing bible<br />
studies for...well, I mostly have guys that have had a drug or<br />
alcohol addiction problem coming to this. They're in a rescue<br />
mission. I'm hoping that these studies can have a little bit of an<br />
influence on the direction of their lives. They're a positive<br />
influence on where they go from here. So it's kind of, people more<br />
than a specific thing or whatever.<br />
<br />
[pause]<br />
<br />
Those are terrible copies.<br />
<br />
Kevin: They are copies. These are from the scans. I was printing scans and<br />
I wasn't trying to make them pretty. Just for my reasons, it was<br />
quick and dirty. I could've bumped the contrast and stuff.<br />
<br />
David: There's Carl.<br />
[pause]<br />
<br />
Kevin: Do have anything left, like how many subscribers you had over time?<br />
Is that data around anymore? How many newsstand copies you had? I<br />
assume that is a lot.<br />
<br />
David: OK, maximum, I think we mentioned that. We hit just about a half a<br />
million before Ziff killed it. Then, they gave people a choice of<br />
three magazines that they expected to continue to publish, PC,<br />
Apple's A+, or Mac User.<br />
I'm guessing that most people went with PC. One of the reasons<br />
actually was Ziff's rationale at that point was, PC World had<br />
really grown a lot and the circulation base of PC World and PC were<br />
very close. They were both about a half million. PC might have had<br />
a small lead.<br />
<br />
Then, by killing Creative Computing and rolling all of those<br />
subscribers, there was some overlap. Certainly, there were some<br />
subscribers that got both magazines. You probably had a quarter of<br />
a million additional subscribers into PC. All of the sudden, they<br />
go to advertise, "We've got three-quarters of a million and PC<br />
World only has half a million."<br />
<br />
That was when PC had a huge growth spurt. You know, they started<br />
publishing those telephone-book-thick issues.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I would think that it probably still holds the record for the<br />
largest magazine ever published, whenever the issue was that they<br />
published it, it was their biggest one. Certainly magazines aren't<br />
getting bigger now. They didn't continue to increase in size after<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: Then they started publishing it twice a month. The nudge that the<br />
subscriber base at Creative, gave to PC really, separated them<br />
completely from PC World. They had their reasons.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK. This is a chart of the page count of Creative Computing over<br />
its life. It's not a question, I just made a chart. Every December<br />
there's a peak for the big December issue. Right at the end it<br />
just, all of the sudden, stopped.<br />
<br />
David: Well, that's when Ziff had decided to kill it, which was almost a<br />
year before. They basically let us publish for another eight or<br />
nine months after they had made the decision.<br />
<br />
Betsy: There was a lot of back and forth. Are they going to kill it? Are<br />
they not going to kill it?<br />
<br />
David: They weren't promoting, no subscription promotion. They were saving<br />
their money. If you don't promote the subscriptions, you're not<br />
going to get them.<br />
<br />
Betsy: This is page count.<br />
<br />
David: It was advertising.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:48:59]<br />
<br />
David: It wasn't actually subscriber base didn't drop them. That's cool.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I just thought I'd do a comparison, even though that's not really<br />
what I'm doing here. In the beginning, you guys were bimonthly and<br />
they were monthly. I couldn't know how to do it accurately. Their<br />
page count's actually higher, because they were doing twice as<br />
much. I don't have all the data here. You guys tended to publish<br />
larger issues than "Kilobyte?"<br />
<br />
David: It was so dependent upon advertising. You got some magazines, they<br />
would run 80, 90 percent advertising, if they could. In some<br />
special interest fields, you can get away with that, because people<br />
are actually buying the magazine for the advertising, not for the<br />
editorial content.<br />
<br />
Betsy: [inaudible 01:50:02] , a good example.<br />
<br />
David: That's exactly right. Even what the guys that bought Military<br />
Vehicles, they just went over so heavily to...I always believe that<br />
you should have at least one-third editorial content, preferably<br />
more. They dropped down to 20 percent to edit.<br />
<br />
Kevin: There was one issue, the 10th anniversary issue, I don't mean to be<br />
picking on Wayne here. There was this quote he happened to say,<br />
which I thought was really interesting to me, I wanted to get your<br />
take on it. He said, this is in 1984, "A computer system doesn't<br />
really stand a prayer anymore unless there's at least one<br />
dedicated, independent magazine for its users."<br />
<br />
David: Wayne said that?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Wayne said that. Is that true? At the time, would you have agreed<br />
with that?<br />
<br />
David: In '84? Again, you've got to look at where we were in the cycle at<br />
that point. The cycle was then, there were more computers dying off<br />
than there were new ones being released. Standardization had come<br />
in really. You've got the IBM PC, and everybody's producing a PC<br />
clone. Apple kept going, and Atari, and Commodore attempted to.<br />
If you were to start a computer company at that point, with a new<br />
computer, yeah, you'd need something to give your user base<br />
something to do with it, more than just what the manufacturer was<br />
selling. So, that's probably accurate. What do you think?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Yeah, I think it's accurate. That's what people started to expect.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yeah. Another chord of the same issue which we've kind of touched<br />
on from Tom Dwyer. This is in 1984. He's saying, "Computer<br />
magazines used to have personality [laughter] and now they don't."<br />
Now, they really don't.<br />
<br />
Betsy: They really don't!<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: I think they still have personality in form but now it's just<br />
inconsistent.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah. Right.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Who was Tom Dwyer? I don't remember him.<br />
<br />
David: Tom Dwyer? He was at University of Pittsburgh. He came up with all<br />
those neat applications. He and Margo...He had the best basic<br />
primer of anybody, in fact the only one that both Kemeny and Kurtz<br />
endorsed outside of their own material. He had really written some<br />
good Basic books.<br />
<br />
Kevin: I'm just finishing up here. The Internet says you were born in<br />
1939. Is that right?<br />
<br />
David: Yes.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Where were you born?<br />
<br />
David: New York, New York.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Excellent.<br />
<br />
David: I was born in the hospital that my father had a hand in designing.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Really?<br />
<br />
David: He was an architect up until the Recession. I think he, perhaps,<br />
designed the restrooms but he wasn't the...<br />
[laughter]<br />
<br />
Kevin: When were you two married?<br />
<br />
Betsy: 1988. 25 years ago.<br />
<br />
David: June 18, 1988.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What's your last name now?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Mine?<br />
<br />
Kevin: Yes.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Ahl.<br />
<br />
Kevin: OK.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I tried keeping this professional thing and it was just way too<br />
confusing, since that really wasn't my name anyway. That was my<br />
first husband's name, and then just...this is way too complicated.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My wife kept her maiden name and now she wishes she hadn't. It's<br />
just confusing. It just made sense to do.<br />
<br />
Betsy: If had been my maiden name, I might have, but it really wasn't.<br />
<br />
Kevin: What haven't I asked you that I should have?<br />
<br />
David: [laughs] We kind of were noodling it around last night and said,<br />
"Man, the guy's thorough."<br />
<br />
Betsy: You the most prepared interviewer ever.<br />
<br />
David: I jotted down a couple of notes. Nope.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Got everything?<br />
<br />
David: What's your thinking? Because originally you were talking to me<br />
about covering Wayne's magazines and so on.<br />
<br />
Kevin: My original thought, when I had put no thought into it, was that it<br />
would be half about Wayne's magazine and half about Creative. First<br />
of all, after talking to him, I thought there's not enough to do<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: Did you talk to Wayne?<br />
<br />
Kevin: I talked to Wayne.<br />
<br />
David: Well that's good to know, right? Carl Helmers didn't know if Wayne<br />
was still alive.<br />
<br />
Kevin: He's still alive.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's true. We asked Carl Helmers if Wayne was still alive and he<br />
was [inaudible 01:56:06] .<br />
<br />
David: Actually, there was another guy up there that published a computer<br />
magazine. What the heck was the name of it?<br />
<br />
Betsy: Who are you talking about?<br />
<br />
David: Up in New Hampshire, Peterborough. It was one of the earlier would-<br />
be competitors to Datamation. So, it was much earlier.<br />
He was absolutely totally convinced about the Kennedy assassination<br />
and published a computer analysis of all the photos and everything<br />
else. Every single issue of the magazine had this stuff. He and<br />
Wayne were on the same wavelength on that. You ask Wayne about the<br />
conspiracy. [laughs] You'll get an earful.<br />
<br />
Kevin: In answer to your question. First, it was going to be the two, and<br />
then that happened. Also my wife said, "If you're doing two, then<br />
it's going to seem like a compare and contrast thing." That's not<br />
what I want to do.<br />
Now I'm thinking that this will be a project about the earliest<br />
computer magazines, the first computer magazines. That way, I can,<br />
whatever, four or five chapters. One on Creative, and maybe Byte.<br />
I'm meeting with the editor of Byte in a couple of weeks at an<br />
event, maybe Interface Age or one of the other ones.<br />
<br />
David: If you can find Bob Jones, that would be an interesting contrast.<br />
He was Interface Age. He had a different perspective on a lot of<br />
things, and I had a lot of respect for him. He just didn't sell at<br />
the right time. Too bad. Bob Jones was a very serious, good guy.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Who were the other early people? Dr. Dobbs? I don't know what...<br />
<br />
Betsy: Oh, Dr. Dobbs...<br />
<br />
David: Jim Warren! Oh my goodness. That would give you another perspective<br />
altogether.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That's, again, the California...<br />
<br />
David: Jim Warren and Bob Albrecht are tied together very closely. They're<br />
both in sort of in the alternative lifestyle. I don't know what<br />
you'd call it.<br />
<br />
Betsy: That probably had Friday afternoon pot parties. [laughter]<br />
<br />
David: Oh, boy. Did they ever! Yes, yes. Jim also was the one that started<br />
the West Coast computer fairs. He's a very capable guy. Dr. Dobb's<br />
journal was in a sense, well, you've probably seen it. You have,<br />
right? OK, so you know.<br />
That's really low level programming rather than higher languages.<br />
We're talking about machine languages, assembly language,<br />
programming, and there. It was sort of like Microsystems was to<br />
Byte. Microsystems, for the really serious hardware guy. Dr. Dobbs<br />
was for the really serious programmer, compared to Creative which<br />
was for people who just wanted to type something in that would<br />
work.<br />
<br />
Kevin: [inaudible 01:59:35] basic right. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Dr. Dobbs. That was a totally different [inaudible 01:59:43]<br />
competitor.<br />
<br />
David: We didn't compete at all. I had a view that we competed at all with<br />
them; they may have thought we did but I didn't think so.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Did they even have advertising?<br />
<br />
David: Oh yeah, actually they did, and it kept going for a long time<br />
because it was a small little nitch magazine. But, yeah, Jim Warren<br />
would be an interesting guy, very interesting guy early on. I don't<br />
know about Albert because you say he published more tabloid<br />
newspapers. I don't know if they ever really published any magazine<br />
size thing or not. Probably not, but it would give me a totally<br />
different perspective because they are coming from the west coast,<br />
looser or whatever.<br />
<br />
Kevin: That sounded pretty loose.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah nothing compared to that.<br />
<br />
Betsy: I think he was sort of in rebellion when he started working at<br />
Creator Computing because he was coming off of AT&T where he had to<br />
wear a suit to work every day. So the first thing he did was burn<br />
his suits and wear t-shirt and jeans way before anybody was doing<br />
that.<br />
<br />
David: I went extremely in the other direction, yeah I did, but who else<br />
real early. Personal computing which I think David Barnell somehow<br />
involved in it at some point in there. Because they moved from the<br />
west coast to New Jersey, they were bought by...who was that? It<br />
was mostly a company that published things like hardware age and<br />
advertiser-driven magazines. What was the name?<br />
<br />
Betsy: I don't remember.<br />
<br />
David: Oh, gosh. Begins with an 'H'.<br />
<br />
Betsy: Halshep<br />
<br />
David: No. Anyway, when they brought personal computing...I think Barnell<br />
maybe even started it, and then they moved it to New Jersey, and<br />
then David said "I'm not going to New Jersey. I'm a west coast<br />
guy," or whatever. And then, they changed the whole thing totally.<br />
That's why I said they're one of the ones where they were so<br />
totally advertiser driven. A press release is a product review, as<br />
far as they were concerned.<br />
They had some interesting stuff. They were a competitor only in<br />
name, but also because they got the advertising. "I think I'm going<br />
to advertise." "Oh! We're going to publish a wonderful review! Give<br />
it to us." And so they were early, and they made money. There were<br />
a bunch of flash-in-the-pan magazines that lasted 2 or 3 or maybe 6<br />
issues, but nobody...<br />
<br />
Kevin: But only one in seven made it, so...<br />
<br />
Betsy: One in seven, right?<br />
<br />
David: That's right, exactly. I can't remember the name of some of these<br />
ones, but there was a very successful big magazine that published<br />
all Apple...reviews of Apple stuff. What was that one? Apple by<br />
themselves spawned I'd guess half a dozen magazines.<br />
<br />
Kevin: Inquest, and Insider, and Apple...a bunch of others there.<br />
<br />
David: Right. Actually, there's one that I can't think of the name of, it<br />
turned out, it was bigger and thicker and creative. They were<br />
publishing a lot of stuff, but again, it would all be positive and<br />
so they really killed us on getting advertising. We had been a<br />
publisher of Apple material for a while. Then all these others came<br />
along. That one, whatever it was, was really took a lot of<br />
advertising from us. I'll think about it.<br />
<br />
Kevin: You'll remember.<br />
<br />
David: I'll remember some of this. When it all settled out, you came back<br />
down to eight or nine, but the ones we're talking about...<br />
<br />
Kevin: Well, at one point there was 200.<br />
<br />
David: Yeah, I think that's correct.<br />
<br />
Betsy: You are probably counting newsletters..<br />
<br />
Kevin: Probably industry-specific stuff and niche stuff but still, you<br />
went from one to 200, 10 years ago.<br />
<br />
David: Yes. That's true.</div>Maury