Dave Ahl and Betsy Ahl
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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.
Source: ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast
Source URL: http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-280-david-and-betsy-ahl-creative-computing-magazine
Interviewer: Kevin Savetz
Kevin: I'm interested in how you guys got together. Was it some sort of
office romance? [laughs]
Betsy: It started before then. I was working at Drew University and I was
dating the computer science professor. He invited Dave...he was a
subscriber to Creative Computing. I can remember being at his house
and picking up a copy of this magazine and thinking, "Creative
Computing," and laughing. "What kind of a title is that?"
He invited Dave to come speak to one of his classes. While he was
there, he said, "I should stop by your placement office. We're
starting to expand. I'm looking for some people." Right? Am I
getting this right? I was looking for other opportunities, so I
sent him my resume. Many months later, he hired me.
David: She still smarts about that.
[laughter]
David: I interviewed her in, I don't know, April or so.
Betsy: You interviewed me on April 17th and you did not hire me until
August 1st. [laughs]
David: A lot was going on that year. That was '78.
Betsy: It was a really long time after that that we got married. We didn't
get married until 10 years later.
David: Actually, I had hired Betsy as our business manager. That's what I
really needed.
Kevin: Not a wife, then.
Betsy: Not wife then, either.
David: Not at that point. We had 2 buildings.
Betsy: We had one.
David: Oh, well I was looking for...
Betsy: My first job was to find another building.
David: We were expanding like crazy. In fact, one of the reasons that I
didn't hire her sooner, I had just left my day job at AT&T, and was
facing up to, "Oh my gosh, can I afford to take a salary out of
Creative Computing?" Yes, we had expanded a lot, but can I even pay
myself, much less other senior people? I left AT&T in July, and
finally by August it became clear I really have to get this
administration end of things under control.
The editorial was OK. I had enough outside contributors that were
going along with what we were doing in-house that I could continue
with that, but it was the other end of things where we really had
some problems. So then we go to 2 separate facilities. One was a 2
family house on the other side of Morristown, and the other was a
converted greenhouse garage, which is where I started. So, Betsy
was in the greenhouse garage where I had the administration side of
things, and I was at the house and that was the editorial and art
and...
Betsy: Software.
David: ...putting the magazine together. Software, right. So she would
come over from her place to my office every day or two just to let
me know what's going on, and we'd get together. But it wasn't until
I don't' remember the date when Betsy was saying, "Well, I'd like
to get into..."
Betsy: Well I had spent all my summers in college and two thereafter
working at our local newspaper, writing editing and putting the
whole thing together, so I think I more or less just said, "We've
got all these new product announcements that we don't have anybody
to do, why don't I just do them?" So, I started out doing the press
releases and things.
David: Her newspaper experience was first in high school covering sports.
Betsy: Yeah, I started out covering the unpopular sports as a senior in
high school. Because they didn't want a girl to write about the
important sports. So they let the girl write about the unimportant
sports, which turned out to be the winning sports, at this small
New Jersey high school. That's how I started.
David: And then at the newspaper, you started by writing obituaries,
right?
Betsy: Well, it's one of the things I did. I always wanted to be a Spanish
teacher. I didn't know anything about this. So, I got this sports-
writing job by way of a babysitting job, I babysat for the
publisher's kids and on the way home one night he said to me, "We
always have a boy from the school who writes about the sports for
the paper, do you know anybody?" and I said, "Well, I know the guy
who did it last year, and if he could do it, I could do it."
So I did that and didn't' think much more of it. Went off to
college, came back over spring break, and ran into the guy in the
grocery store and he said, "Would you like a job working for the
paper this summer?" And I said sure. I had no idea whether he
wanted me to sweep the floors or what, but it was a job so I took
it. It was in the editorial department.
And I learned from some very serious journalists who had worked for
a very good paper, the Newark Evening News, which was a very
serious paper that probably was too serious and folded, probably in
the mid '60s, but these people were really good journalists and
they taught me a lot.
I think it was that first year, about halfway through the summer
the publisher was on vacation, the editor was going to go on
vacation when the publisher came back and the publisher, the day he
was supposed to come back had appendicitis, had to have an
appendectomy which back in those days was a much bigger deal than
it is now. The editor said, "Well, I'm leaving." [laughs] And there
I was. I was running this little paper.
David: So I figured if you can run a newspaper, even though it's just a
summer job, she could do a lot for us. Well, Betsy continued to
handle the administrative things for really quite awhile and, as
she said, probably was initially doing new product releases. Cause
you get just tons of it over the transom and from these smaller
companies...
Kevin: So you'd like get a press release and then you'd rewrite it, that
sort of things?
Betsy: Well we had a new product section and it was a format, a style for
them, for each one. If they sent a photo, do a photo, a cut line
for it. Basically what I do is let them pile up and then sort
through and figure out which ones were worthy of attention. And
then it was kind of just filler. They ran in one column and when
you came to the end of the magazine whatever you had leftover you
would fill in with these.
David: And the thing is that the companies that were putting out these
press releases, this was back in the, what '76, '77 or so, tiny
little companies. They had no marketing expertise so they were
sending us, in some cases, not quite handwritten but pretty crude.
So it took some editing and some real work to make them readable.
And then, as Betsy said, you had to guess. OK, which one, this is a
significant product but is this guy going to be able to make this
company go or is it just going to flop? And we tried to be
responsible to the readers. Reporting on things that weren't just a
wonderful great new idea but something that they were going to have
on the market that was going to get some support and everything
else. So anyway. That was a long story of how we got together.
Kevin: I still don't know how you got together.
Betsy: We were working in an office about as large as this banquette here
together. Because when we first started working together we didn't
have this other house. So it was the two of us. You had an actual
desk I believe. I had a table that he had made out of particle
board. Yeah it was fancy and I had to put duct tape along it
because the edge was making holes in my clothes.
So we worked in this office back to back, sort of got to know each
other, and became friends, little by little. He said to me, when
you're looking for this building, it would be a good thing if there
was a place for me to live because I'm in the process of getting
separated from my wife. Which it turned out you didn't do right
away but eventually you did. Right?
David: Well, it was three months later. That was right away in a sense.
What precipitated that was we had a woman that was working in the
mailroom and she got in cahoots with somebody in the accounting
department and they started working a little embezzlement.
Kevin: This was at the [inaudible 00:13:49] ?
David: Pardon?
Betsy: At Creative Computing.
David: No, at Creative Computing. This was just after Betsy was hired. In
fact, they had it going on before and I mean they were very good at
it. What they did is they set up a bank account in the name of
Creative Computing in the next county. And they would take very
fourth or fifth check and it might be a subscription, it might be
paying for an ad or something...
Betsy: It was mostly the advertisers.
David: Well it was both. And then they put that into their bank account.
And then the one that was in the accounting department would mark
the thing as paid.
Betsy: No, she didn't. That was her mistake.
David: Well, she didn't.
Betsy: Because that wasn't her job.
David: Well she blew one. In any event it was my advertising manager that
we had sent an overdue notice to one of the advertisers.
Betsy: It was Apple.
David: Huh?
Betsy: It was Apple. It was Regis McKenna, it was Apple's agency.
David: And they said, we paid that. And a woman said, well send me proof.
And they did. And we looked at the bank where it was deposited and
then we called in local detective, police department. And they got
the bank records and said, "How much do you think this was?" Well
no they didn't say that, they said, this is probably a lot more
than you thought.
And it turned out to be well over $100,000. And our total annual,
not even profit at that point...well, the gross was just about a
million at that point, not quite, but close to it. So $100,000 was
a big, big chunk 10 percent.
Kevin: When was this?
David: '78. And, so, obviously we fired these two. And then the court
finally, they determined that they had also, one of them had been
involved in welfare fraud and other stuff and the court ordered
them to pay it back at the rate of, I don't know...
Betsy: 47 cents a week.
David: It was some tiny amount.
Kevin: [inaudible 00:16:26]
[laughter and crosstalk]
Betsy: Course they'll never pay anything.
David: And we got one payment you know, and that was it.
Betsy: And she was ordered to do public service. Like who wants someone
doing public service for them who's done something like that?
Kevin: Magazines back then, probably any business but, they were a hotbed
of intrigue. You had that happened and then the whole Bike Magazine
getting stolen.
David: So Betsy actually, in response to that brought, in response to the
embezzlement brought in her Sister-in-Law Bobbi, and I think your
mother too...
Betsy: It was Bobbi's mother.
David: Bobbi's mother, OK. But one to...
Betsy: My mother in law. I was a widow at the time.
David: ...do some of the accounting because we didn't have an accountant
and wanted just to help out and make some calls to advertisers and
say can you speed up your payment a little bit and also calls to
people that we owed money to, hey we're going to be maybe a little
late. It really didn't look good. That was just a huge amount of
money and so we had to stretch things out and hope that the growth
continued so we could recover some of this.
Betsy really rescued us there. It was amazing. We finally did
stretch things out. What precipitated the separation with my wife
at the time is I went home and told her this had happened and
everything.
Betsy: It was Thanksgiving weekend. Day before Thanksgiving.
David: The day before Thanksgiving is when we got all the information from
the police department and I went home to my wife and she said, "You
dumb...," well I won't repeat the whole thing but, "You are so
stupid. You trust people." "Yes, I trust people." "You shouldn't
trust people like that. Get out of the house. I can't put up with
this anymore." So it was a good thing we had a two family house.
Betsy: We had this two family house.
David: I moved into the bedroom on one side.
Betsy: He had his office on one side of the top floor in the back bedroom
and his bedroom in the back bedroom on the other side and his
kitchen. [laughs]
Kevin: Is this the place I was reading about where your bedroom was above
the kitchen?
Betsy: Yes. The Ted Nelson.
David: Anyway, a lot of things precipitated. Because of that, we had to
make some other changes on personnel and move some people around. I
think after that then Betsy took more of a role in the editorial
end of things.
Kevin: Stayed there until the bitter end.
Betsy: The bitter end. Actually, I was there after he was gone.
David: That's true.
Betsy: Ziff continued to pay me several months after they closed the
magazine to stay behind and clean up because we have a 75,000
square foot building. Make sure that we don't dispose of the
hardware and just basically get it ready.
Kevin: When you quit at the phone company to start a magazine, that must
have been scary.
David: I had left Digital Equipment in 1974, and I'm sure you read the
whole rationale behind that, and joined AT&T in marketing,
educational marketing. Same thing I was doing at Deck but obviously
marketing different products to a different mix of customers. AT&T,
back then and perhaps today, they had a real formula that you're in
a job for two years and then they rotate you out or they put you in
another job.
The way AT&T works is they have certain steps. There's a manager
and then a director level. There are levels, one, two, three, four,
five. The operating companies, like Pacific Bell and so on, have
similar steps that are considered a half step below AT&T. What they
do is they rotate you out to an operating company, a half step
promotion, they rotate you back into AT&T, now you're a full step.
You never get a full step in one company.
They had offered me a rotation to Southern Bell. Birmingham,
Alabama. "No. No." Then probably two or three months later said
we've got an opening in Wisconsin Tel. "Oh my gosh. Come on,
something sensible." I turned them down, which was bad. You can't
turn down. If you turn down three you might as well retire.
The third one was, in a sense, it wasn't a promotion but it was a
sideways job jump within AT&T itself. I went from having the
education group, which was about eight people, to corporate
communications, which is about 100 people and a huge budget. I was
responsible for all of the marketing communications for the whole
Bell system. Not advertising.
We had seminar centers, put out all kinds of educational pamphlets,
even a magazine for our customers on how to use the equipment. I
was doing that. It's a big job. It's a 50 hour a week job. Creative
Computing was halfway down the block. I'd go there at lunch time,
see how things were doing.
As I said a little bit ago, when it looked like we were going to
hit a million dollars I said I've got to get serious about this.
That's when I resigned from AT&T. That was probably the first, I
shouldn't say the first, but that was a major problem with my wife
at that time. You're leaving AT&T? You're leaving all those
benefits? What are you doing, you idiot? We were on the downward
spiral at that point and then the embezzlement just sealed the
whole thing.
Leaving any job for an unknown thing like you started a little
company and you leave your day job. You're making a real
commitment.
Kevin: Even once you were at Creative full time, it looks like you did a
lot of everything. You were writing, you were doing programming,
you were being the editor, the publisher and the editor which is
not done anymore.
David: Yeah. I don't know. You can correct me. I don't think I was a
control freak.
Betsy: No. You had Phil Ellenberg. You had just hired Phil Ellenberg as
the advertising manager. Richie was doing it. Where did he come
from? He came from some respectable place. He came from some
respectable place, Phil Ellenberg.
David: Yeah, he did.
Betsy: He was like a real person who had a real job, not like the rest of
us. He was the ad manager. I think once you made the step to leave
AT&T then you mostly concentrated on the editorial. You weren't
selling ads and writing and you had Steve North who was doing a lot
of the editorial.
David: At the beginning, yeah. The thing is I'd be lying if I said I knew
how things were going to go, I knew this was going to be a huge
magazine some day. I had no clue. When I started Creative Computing
there weren't even personal computers at that point. I was
convinced, I guess, that they would come about. I had no idea that
it would be three months later that the Altair came about. It was
more that I thought that an educational magazine like we had been
publishing at Deck should continue.
Deck had dropped off. They stopped publishing Edu when I left the
education group. Well, they published an issue or two but they
really weren't serious about continuing it. Then you had all of
these people out here in the west coast, the Hewlett Packard
computers. They were publishing some good software, they had some
good arrangements with Minnesota Educational Computers Consortium
and some others to distribute stuff that they developed, but there
was no information source for schools and teachers and kids that
were using computers.
That's what I envisioned initially, but then once the Altair and
the others came out people buy this kit computer and say what can I
do with it? We've got these programs that will run.
Betsy: First you have to steal Basic.
David: What?
Betsy: First you have to steal Basic.
David: Yeah, yeah.
Kevin: I noticed that, I don't know what it's called, the public opinion
or I don't know the word, this part here. The number one magazine
of computer applications.
David: That was a Davis thing.
Kevin: It started off first issue a non-profit magazine of educational and
recreational. That was November 1970. May/June 1975 the words non-
profit disappeared.
Betsy: He never set it up as a non-profit.
David: I did not.
Kevin: You started making a profit.
David: That's right. [laughs]
Betsy; It was the unintentionally non-profit.
Kevin: Three years later it quietly changed into the number one magazine
of computer applications and software.
David: That was when Ziff Davis took over.
Kevin: Really? No, that was '78.
Betsy: No, that was '78.
David: Oh, '78.
Kevin: He stayed until the end.
David: Right. OK. You're right. Who knows. We changed it.
Betsy: It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Kevin: It's clearly a shift from education to education plus other things.
David: Yes.
Betsy: I think it was when he realized that if you really wanted to make a
profit you had to leave education behind because teachers want
everything for free, or they certainly did then.
Kevin: They have some websites for teachers. They still do. [laughs]
David: Schools, teachers, yeah, they want everything for free and they get
a lot for free. Places like Huntington Computer Project. There was
one out here, Oregon. Yes, there was. I think it was based right
here in Portland. It would have been, right, if it was in Oregon?
Yes, there was a computing consortium at that time, Hewlett Packard
oriented.
Then you had People's Computer Company down in California that was
sort of providing stuff to schools. They were mostly into
alternative schools and there were a lot of them in the Bay area at
that time. In fact, there was a magazine or a newspaper, big thing,
I don't know how often it came out, called the "De-school Primer".
It was for people that...I won't say they were hippies but
basically homeschoolers but they got together and said, "We're
going to educate our kids outside of the public education system
but we don't want to do it individually. We'll get together." There
was a big movement there and they were into computers, unlike the
public schools back in '75, '76.
Betsy: Homeschooling back then was very avant-garde. It was not approved.
David: Not like today. The shift away from education. That, of course, was
partially driven by the hardware that was then available to people
at home.
When I first started the magazine, I had four editors over the
years, five I guess, but Steve Gray had been publishing a
newsletter, what he called the "Amateur Computer Group Newsletter".
It was for engineers who were scavenging up old parts from
Honeywell and IBM and GE and Deck and trying to put together a
computer. You've got success stories and here's how you can make
this worth together.
That was a long way away from an Altair, but that's what I was
focusing on, people that were doing that and education. Changed our
focus. You're right. Good observation.
Kevin: After that, do you feel the focus changed in the next 10 years?
David: The focus changed largely due to selling the magazine to Ziff
Davis.
Kevin: When's that?
David: We were negotiating for a while and I think the sale finally went
through in '83. Yeah, '83. Maybe late '82 but roughly then. They
felt that you need more of a business focus, small business and
people running businesses out of their home. That's where it
started but then we got into real small businesses. I shouldn't say
real but a store front or a small manufacturer, something like
that. That's probably a direction we would not have gone. I
wouldn't have gone on my own.
Betsy: We had a magazine called "Small Business Computing." Remember?
David: That's right, we did. I would have kept Creative more targeted on
the home market and still education, to some extent, but more on
the home and people that were running a business, a single
entrepreneur. You could review a spreadsheet or a small business
computer or higher end printer or something but not lift it up to
that next level up.
When you're owned by somebody else and they say this is what we
want to do you've got to be responsive to it.
Kevin: Why did you sell? Was it something that had to be done? I've read
the official line.
David: I think the official line is pretty close to the real line. What
happened is the first magazine, maybe not the very first but the
first sizable magazine, to sell was the Byte and they sold to
McGraw Hill. Then there were three or four other sales. At the time
there were maybe eight special interest publishers in the country.
You had Hurst and CBS magazine and Ziff Davis. Maybe eight serious
ones. There were some others that were, "Oh, it'd be nice if we
could get into it."
What happened is all of us at that point were spending maybe
$100,000, $150,000 on circulation promotion. McGraw Hill says we
want to get out there, we're going to spend a million dollars.
They're mailing 10 times as much as we are. They're going to trade
shows with big, elaborate booths and handing out all kinds of...
Betsy: Free magazines.
David: Not only free magazines but other stuff. That was half of it. The
other half, which was probably more than half, was the advertising
sales. We were using reps. We had different reps in different parts
of the country, paying the rep commission on the advertising. When
you are a McGraw Hill or a Hurst or a Ziff Davis you've got an in-
house staff. They would have a reception at one of the computer
conferences, a big deal.
Betsy: We used to have a hospitality suite at the hotels in some of these
conferences and then we would bring little hunks of cheese that we
cut up from home and sneak the bottles of wine up the back stairway
and they were having these big things with the giant balls of
shrimp.
David: Yeah. It was just an order of magnitude different than what we
could do. What happened, really, was that it got to the point where
there were only three, really two, serious bidders that were still
looking for a magazine and there are still about four magazines,
four decent quality magazines, on the market and one was Compute,
one was Interface Age. Personal Computing had just sold, there was
us, and I forget who the fourth one was. There was four.
Kevin: There were more magazines than buyers at this point.
David: That's right. There were a lot more magazines, too, but there were
four major players. One of the buyers, I didn't really regard them
as serious, and that was Atari. I think they wanted to back into
the thing. The two buyers left were CBS, and they had a magazine
division at that time, and Ziff Davis and that was it. I said,
"Man, I've got to make a deal here." That's what happened.
I look back with hindsight. I said the guy, Robert I forget his
last name, that owned Compute magazine, he held out. He held out
until the end and he said, "I'm better than Interface Age," and he
was and whatever the other one was, Family Computing, "I'm better
than them." He got a really nice payoff from CBS because it was the
last one and they wanted him. I don't know. If I had held off a
little more would I have gotten more? Probably.
Kevin: How much did you get?
David: Can we publish this figure?
Betsy: I don't know. I don't think we ever have.
David: No, we never have.
Kevin: It's my chance for a scoop.
David: Pardon?
Kevin: It's my chance for a scoop.
David: [laughs] I'd rather not say. I can tell you Compute, if you ever
read that number, which you will, it was seven times that much. It
was huge. Huge. At that point, I think CBS just said we've got to
get into this. We've really got to do something. The big loser was
Bob Jones at Interface Age. He had a good magazine. That was a
good, solid magazine. Bob Jones, he went to shows, he was always in
a suit and tie. He would have fit into the corporate environment
very well but he held out too long. I think he was holding out for
even more.
That's what I was afraid of. Less than a year later he was out of
business. There was no way you could compete with these big guys.
Ziff instantly started having these receptions at PC expos.
Betsy: They had ad reps all over the country.
David: Ad reps, yeah. Oh my gosh. We would not have survived.
Kevin: Again, you [inaudible 00:41:03] .
David: Yeah. Not exactly right but yes. Wasn't bad. Wasn't bad.
Kevin: But Ziff didn't have it for very long before they let it go. It was
only a couple of years.
David: It was almost four years. Three and a half years. They did a study,
and this is one of the classics. I've been making a presentation at
Leslie Park last year on the 10 biggest blunders in personal
computing, and actually it's up to 12 now. One was, and I still
feel that it was huge, is that Ziff Davis analyzed that market in
'85 and determined that the home market, the market for home
computers, had reached saturation. Five percent of the homes have a
computer. That's it.
There were three things, three major conclusions from their survey.
I think probably one and a half of them were pretty good and one
and a half were just absolutely wrong. The home market reaching
saturation, wrong. The second one was that they said that the
magazines that would be successful would be those that were focused
on specific brands of computers. Are you getting all that?
Kevin: Yeah.
David: With the IBM PC it really brought standardization to the industry.
Their analysis was that Apple and PC were going to be the dominant
players in the future and in that they were right. They said we've
got to have a magazine that's just focused on those two and they
did. What was their Apple magazine? They had two Apple magazines.
Betsy: A+.
David: But they also had the one for the Mac.
Betsy: Mac User.
David: They had two Apple magazines and then PC. PC they spun off a whole
bunch. PC Week.
Betsy: PC Junior.
David: A bunch of them. In any event, they were right in that. The other
one that they were semi-right, in the long term future they were
totally wrong but in the short term future they were probably
right, and that they looked at...We had been covering bulletin
board systems. CompuServe, whatever its predecessor was, basically
online type of stuff.
Betsy: Genie.
David: Yes. They said that's just a flash in a pan, online stuff. Well, in
'85 it was. It took a while. It took another 8 to 10 years for that
but then oh my God. You know what's happened today. If they had
stuck with Creative Computing and rather than trying to make it a
small business focused magazine but kept the home and the online
focus we would have owned the Internet market today, absolutely
owned it. It would have been a bigger magazine than all the others
put together. Hindsight is 20/20.
Kevin: I know it wasn't your choice but do you have regret about that?
David: Yeah.
Betsy: At the time it was devastating.
David: Absolutely.
Betsy: It was like someone killing your child.
David: At the time, we sat in these meetings up in Stanford, Connecticut,
of all places. The reason for that is Bill Ziff. What happened in
the interim a year or two after they purchased Creative Computing
and PC, Bill Ziff came down with cancer really big time and was
afraid of dying next year. So he was moving all of his resources
and the holdings outside of New York to avoid really major
taxation. I'm not sure that Connecticut was much better but he was
splitting them between Connecticut and Florida. Anyway, we wound up
having a bunch of meetings.
Betsy: He was trying to maintain residence in Connecticut.
David: Yeah, I guess that was it.
Betsy: He was living in the Crown Plaza.
David: I remember the last one. We were up at the hotel.
Betsy: Crown Plaza. It was Stanford, it wasn't Harvard.
David: Yeah, Stanford.
Betsy: I said Harvard.
David: When they finally came and said we're going to shut this down. That
was a devastating time. We probably could have continued to work
for Ziff if we had been willing to go into New York but when you
get used to working a mile or two from where you live the idea of
commuting into New York, who knows what the job would have been.
Bye. That was it. That was, in retrospect, a mistake.
The other thing that happened as a result of Bill Ziff having this
bout with cancer is that Ziff Davis sold off all of their other
special interest magazines. Popular Boating, Popular Photography.
Betsy: Yachting, Modern Bride.
David: They had a big group of travel magazines. Actually, one of the
things they did after Creative Computing was to shut down...we got
friendly with the publisher and some of the people in the traveling
division and we started doing some freelance travel writing.
I was writing a monthly column for one of the travel magazines that
went to travel agents on automating your travel office and so on,
which was an interesting thing because there's a small business
that really depended upon computers with the reservation systems
and all the airlines had a different reservation system. You had to
have Saber.
A lot of them would go with one and make an agreement with somebody
else to make their other reservations. In any event, it was a bad
system and I was writing a column on how to make this work for you.
As you know, I don't know how many months later we got into the
Atari camp.
Kevin: That was your next gig?
David: Yeah. It was Joe Sugarman, remember, that hooked us up with Atari.
Betsy: I thought it was Neil Harris.
David: He was the one we worked with but it was Sugarman.
Betsy: Because he came from Commodore. I didn't know it was Joe Sugarman.
David: He ran a company called JS&A for Joe Sugarman and Associates. They
were the first one that took these full page ads in lots of
different magazines and the quarter page...
Betsy: The first advertorials.
David: Yeah, advertorial. The first print advertorials. Really serious
stuff. Out of that, he spawned at least a dozen other companies.
Sharper Image is a Sugarman and it's a spinoff. They've got a whole
page just focused on this air ionizer or some crazy product, but he
sold tons of that stuff. Then he started offering courses. He was
on the verge of doing some big deal with Atari and so he knew all
the people out there.
I had taken his course and started running the ad. In fact, there's
probably one in one of those issues that is basically a Sugarman
ad. And so anyway, you took the course, too. So we got to know him.
He got to know us, and we kept up. And, oh, OK. Creative Computing
has folded, and I'm trying to get something going with Atari and
getting their magazine really serious. And so he was the one that
hooked us up with them. By the way, I'm surprised that you don't
have Atari Explorer on your website
Kevin: On the website? Well, the deal with my Atari magazines website is
I've always strove to get permission. Atari can't be owned by the
same company for more than three months at time.
[laughter]
Betsy: It's hard to get permission that way.
Kevin: You can't get permission. But it's out there, elsewhere. There are
other archivists who don't bother to get permission. That's another
good way to do things. Yeah, it's out there. I think Archive.org
has it.
David: Really? Yeah, because I hadn't seen it. I was looking for
something...I still get inquires every once in a while from
somebody that wants something in one of the previous magazines that
we've published.
Kevin: That's why I don't' risk it. There's a few magazine that I just
absolutely would not, because it's owned by some giant monolith
corporation now, and they need to hold on everything even if it's
30 years old.
Betsy: Because someday they might be able to make money from it.
Kevin: Right. That's why that's not there.
Talk to me about...You did some weird stuff. The weird stuff I'm
thinking of is the board game.
[laughter]
David: "Computer Rage."
Kevin: Yes.
Betsy: We just saw that. We might not have even remembered what it was it,
but we saw it last night at the museum.
David: They have one in the Collection's area of the Computer Museum. They
didn't even know that we published it. I thought, "Look at this."
Kevin: You did Computer Rage, which was weird; I want to ask you about
that. You did the record album.
Betsy: The record album made way more sense than the game.
David: Yeah, well it was a guy named Allan. He was a colonel at that time
and he came to see me with the idea for the computer game.
Betsy: I forgot about that.
David: He was a colonel in the Army and had something to do with
educational programs. The Army said people should know more about
how computers work and everything else. He said, "The games that
are on the market are pretty tacky and not fun. I've devised
something." We worked together with him. We finally decided, "All
right. We'll publish this game. By the way, he's a general and
finally retired.
Betsy: But he's not financing his retirement with [inaudible 00:54:29] .
[laughter]
David: No, not at all.
Kevin: Will anyone buy this?
David: Oh, absolutely.
Betsy: We did overprint.
David: It wasn't a big seller or big success, but we sold enough of them.
Now the record was a little different. There was a guy named Dick
Moberg who, at the time, was the president of the Philadelphia Area
Computer Society. The first two personal computer festivals were
actually in New Jersey, not the west coast. The West Coast Computer
Faire came later with Jim Warren and that group. John Dilks started
this computer festival in Atlantic City. This was before Atlantic
City was a big casino place, but...
Betsy: Well, it was a casino place, but...
David: ...but it was pretty tacky.
Betsy: It still is.
Kevin: Not like now.
Betsy: Not like now where it's so classy.
David: In any event, they were having some issues with the hotel and the
convention center in Atlantic City. Dick Moberg said, "We people in
Philadelphia can do a better job than you guys in New Jersey." And
he got together with what was his name? Lenny? And
Betsy: Oh! Saul Levis.
David: Saul Levis, who was the president of the New Jersey amateur
computer group. The two of them got together and said yeah, it'll
be more convenient if we do a thing in Philadelphia. And Saul
Levis, he had put together the first Trenton computer festival. It
wasn't a big huge thing; it's gotten to be gigantic. In any event
they said OK, we'll do this. At that point, this was '78; the Apple
had just come out and people were making little plug-in
peripherals.
There was a company that...I'm not going to be able to remember who
it was. They made a nice little plug-in board for the Apple. What
they had was a very nice thing on the screen where you could
position notes and then have them played back. So it was a visual
programming of music.
Kevin: Music Construction Center?
Betsy: There were ads for it in magazines.
David: No, it was a guy out of Denver. I don't remember. Anyway, before
that everything had appeared line by line. But there were some
reasonable playback systems that were starting to come on the
market for the S-100 bus. There were about four of them. The
programming was a little bit harrier, but nonetheless they sounded
OK. And then there was still the leftovers in a sense that people
that were doing work on mainframes to process music.
So Dick Moberg said, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could get a number
of these together?" And of course there's the Philadelphia
Orchestra, we'll make it a Philadelphia Computer Music Festival! So
it was largely his idea, but then, how do you publicize it? Well,
you've got this magazine that's in your backyard, that was willing
to recruit some people and publicize it. So we got about...I don't
know at the festival there were probably 25 or 30 people that had
stuff.
They recorded it all, which in retrospect was a bit of a mistake
because they had problems with one of the two channels in the
stereo. They had the big reel-to-reel tape recorder, one of the
channels was seriously too low. And then they said, "Well, we've
got this wonderful tape; what are we going to do with it?" And I
said, "Well, I'll do something with it."
I hooked up with a studio in the city that made records, and we
went in there and corrected the low channel a little bit, not
totally, but enough that it sounded like stereo. And put together a
vinyl record!
I edited out a lot of the poor quality performances, made the
record, and that sold! It sold pretty well. Our biggest problem was
shipping. How do you ship a 12-inch vinyl record without it
breaking? But that sold pretty well. That, of course, died off
along with everything else when Creative Computing got killed by
Ziff. But, I still had the original test pressing of that, the
original, original.
I played it back, and it sounded very good. Put it into, I forget
what the software was, but, it was one, the digital routine. It
would have been nice if I still had the original tape, but, I
didn't. But, OK, it's got a little bit of deterioration, going to a
record.
On the other hand, we're not talking about losing overtones of a
violin up at 15,000 hertz. It was within a narrow band, to begin
with, in any event. But that did let me totally correct the left
channel and bring it up to what it should be. I put that out. I'm
selling CDs now, of that.
In fact, a guy from Australia ordered one, and obviously, the
postage to send anything overseas is a lot more. He said, "Why
don't you just make MP3 files out of it?" Because, they're WAV
files, the way they are now. I go, "OK."
This is very recent, like within the last couple of weeks, I
downloaded some software, "Convert WAV to MP3," converted it, sent
them the files. They said, "That's great." What I think what I'll
probably do is try to figure out how I can make them available from
a website.
Kevin: You've apparently forgotten that, like, 10 years ago, I did that.
They're there.
David: Yes. I know.
Kevin: They're at vintagecomputermusic.com.
David: Are they MP3s?
Kevin: Yeah.
David: Well, then, I don't have to do it.
Betsy: You dummy.
David: Bam. I did remember. I didn't know that you did them all. I thought
you did a sample.
Kevin: No. They're all there. I can see you're getting reflux.
David: Boom. I wasted a little time. I waste a lot of time, these days.
That was a cool thing.
Kevin: I just think it was neat that you guys were willing to take chances
with weird stuff.
David: Where we took chances with really weird stuff was in the software.
Kevin: Software publishing?
David: We had a brand called, Sensational Software. Unfortunately, Ziff
decided it was competing with some potential advertisers, which it
was, in a sense. They killed it off. But, we had some really good
stuff. We had the Apple game, what the heck was it? It was ported
directly over from the arcade games.
Betsy: Was it, "Space Invaders"?
David: "Space Invaders."
Kevin: It was a clone of, "Space Invaders"?
David: It was the real.
Betsy: You got it from, Jeff Lee's guy.
David: Because, "Space Invaders," the Japanese game, was one of the first
full-sized console video games where they used a general-purpose
chip. "Space Invaders," was programmed for the 6502, Apple.
We bought it from this Japanese company, and we had the only real
"Space Invaders" game. That was one, and a couple of others that we
really could have gone places with. That was just about the time
that Ziff came in and said, "Nah, you can't have this anymore."
They were into printed media, so, they kept the books going, but,
not any of the other stuff. The other thing we had, was, speaking
of computer music, a little division, that probably could have
gotten a lot bigger, called Peripherals Plus. We were marketing a
little computer music board, it was an S-100 bus once. But if we
had then...
Betsy: Didn't we have a plotter, too?
David: Yep. We had about five or six interesting, low-level products. But,
again, Ziff.
Kevin: That stuff was really competing with the advertisers.
David: Yeah. Obviously, that wasn't our intent. But, yes it was. We also
offered courses at that time. Do you remember, at County College?
Betsy: I don't.
David: That was just at when we moved into the new building at Hanover. We
had two people that were doing that.
Betsy: One of them was that crazy, Larry guy. He was seriously weird.
David: County College of Morris, we reached an agreement that we would
teach their Introductory Computer course. Not for their day
students, but they offered evening courses, adult education, we
were doing that. Fingers in a lot of pies, at that point.
Actually, from that standpoint, it was, probably, good that Ziff
got us a little bit more focused, and back to the roots of
publishing. Getting spread a little thin.
Kevin: You went to Atari, got the Atari game, and you did the "Atari
Explorer," right?
David: "Atari Explorer." They had had an occasional publication, not
really a magazine, but one that was focused on the games, and they
decided that they could start that one up again. It started up with
a new name. We called it, "Atarian." It was focused, basically, on
video games. You buy one of their video games and you get an issue.
Anyway, there were different ways that they were going to promote
it.
But, a year later Nintendo just, absolutely, buried "Atarian," in
'89. They kept Atari Spore going for, I think, two more issues,
right?
Betsy: Yeah.
David: Was it two?
Betsy: I don't remember the details.
David: It wasn't much.
Betsy: I remember why they killed it.
David: Ms. Feisty here. Come on. You've got to tell the story here.
Betsy: They were playing games with our printer. Production schedule.
Everybody had a production schedule. We never missed our production
date, getting things to the printer, getting them mailed. We just
did it because that's what you had to do. I will probably get sued
for this. Atari started not paying the printer and the printer says
we're not going to print this until we get paid. The date kept
slipping and slipping and the subscribers would be calling up and
saying, "Where's my magazine?"
This went on. It was bi-monthly. It went on for maybe six months. I
finally wrote an editorial in which I explained to the readers
exactly what was going on. They didn't see it until it was printed.
[laughs]
David: That didn't get into the magazine, though.
Betsy: It did.
David: That's right, it did.
Betsy: They never saw it. We were producing it out of [inaudible 01:10:07]
New Jersey and printing it in eastern Pennsylvania and they never
saw it until it was too late. My tenure was cut short but I didn't
really care at that point. I was sick of them. It was really hard.
They're not easy people to deal with, even when the owners last for
more than three months. That was my suicide by editorial. The only
time in my life I've ever been fired.
David: I didn't realize they didn't read that beforehand but I should
have. I should have.
Betsy: [laughs] I probably wouldn't have gotten fired if they had.
David: That was the straw that broke the camera's back.
Betsy: But then John [inaudible 01:11:05] kept doing it a little bit.
David: I know. In a lot of cases, particularly with the games magazine,
they wanted to approve everything that went in it. If you do an
objective product review, you call it like it is. Oh m gosh, there
was one, it wasn't just one product but a roundup after Consumer
Electronics' show, and I don't remember what it was. Atari had
brought out some new products that really weren't ready to go.
In some cases I just said, "I'm not going to say anything about
this one or these two or three. I'll focus on the ones that are
ready to go or are in good shape." Oh my gosh. "What about this?
This is a wonderful thing." "Well, maybe it will be but it isn't
yet." We had issues all along on censorship and them changing what
we had written and everything. As Betsy said, they were not nice
people to work with. I forget, the two brothers.
Betsy: Trummel.
David: Trummel, yeah. That came from Commodore.
Betsy: Jack and somebody else. Jack and his brother.
David: It was interesting because yesterday I saw Nolan Bushnell. He was
at that event. Nolan was flamboyant, but basically he had integrity
and he was an honest guy. Man, oh man. Didn't stay and the
corporation changed after he left.
Kevin: Then you're done with Atari and then it's straight to military
vehicles there?
David: [laughs] No.
Betsy: There was a hiatus.
David: Oh, man. We published magazines, in-house magazines, for a couple
other organizations. Did one for Nabisco called...I don't even
remember but it was for their marketing department. Published that
for some period of time and then they decided to bring it in-house.
Betsy: It was more like a newsletter.
David: It was 16 pages. It was getting there.
Betsy: 16 pages is a newsletter.
David: All right. Magazine format. Let's put it that way. We did some
fulfillment. Basically, a lot of freelance writing on the travel
field.
Betsy: Stuffed dogs. The stuffed dogs. Remember those four dogs for my
brother?
David: That's fulfillment. Fulfillment for Con Edison. I published a
couple newsletters for a while, one called "Effective Investing"
and one called "Effective Communication" for writers. We're talking
early '90s.
Betsy: That was when people still cared, thought that there might be a
correct way to do something and they wanted to know what it was.
David: That was focused on "Take this computer and start to use it as a
tool. Don't be afraid of the thing." '91/'92 not everybody was
using a computer yet or a personal computer. That was the
orientation of that. Then the other thing we got into big time was
we'd been involved with a local rescue mission for men with drug,
alcohol, homeless issues and we were writing and producing their
newsletter.
Betsy: We were producing all of their fundraising material.
David: We started, I think, with the newsletter.
Betsy: No, we did everything. Appeal letters and newsletters and
maintaining their database, the donor database. It took a lot of
time.
David: We did that for five years. Then '96 I got an opportunity to buy
this crazy military vehicles magazine for people that were
restoring old historic military vehicles. It was a magazine but it
was I guess more of a glorified newsletter.
Betsy: It was horrible.
David: It was horrible but it was really terrible. In fact, the editor or
the publisher, whatever, the owner, he'd take the articles however
the writer would send them. If it was double spaced type, boom,
that's what would appear in the magazine.
Kevin: Save all the typesetting.
Betsy: He had zero typesetting expense.
David: Zero editing. He just took anything that came in, put it in. Ads
the same way. Half the ads were hand written. Well, not half, but a
significant number had corrections on them by hand. Oh my gosh. It
was so terrible. I made it into a real magazine and built it up. At
that point the circulation had been about 10,000. We built it up
and we were pushing close to 20,000 magazines. It was a real
magazine. I sold it to Crowsey publications.
Then they, which I did not realize at the time, the owner, Chet
Crowsey, had put the whole company up for sale and he sold the
company a year or two later to some other specialty magazine
publisher. We're talking narrow, narrow niche. They published a lot
of, what'd they call it, white tail bow hunting. Really, really
narrow stuff. Up in northern Wisconsin is where they were based. In
any event, he sold it.
The new publishers, their whole stick was making money. They
immediately raised the subscription price of military vehicles. We
were charging $18 a year which was fine and they raised it to
$21.95 or something and they raised the advertising rates and
everything else.
The last I knew, the circulation was back down around 10,000.
[laughs] It doesn't pay off to take that approach. I didn't have
the same emotional connection, with that as I did with Creative
Computing and the other magazines there. Fine, you do what you want
with the magazine, it's OK.
Kevin: You didn't care too much?
David: Nah.
Kevin: What do you guys do now? It seems like charity work and [inaudible
01:19:45] ?
Betsy: Yeah. I run a non-profit called Beyond the Walls and he runs his
website and does Bible studies.
David: Right. Actually, Betsy, the organization she has, she's executive
director of Beyond the Wall, that's gotten huge.
Betsy: It's getting bigger and bigger.
David: It's gotten huge.
Betsy: I think huge is probably an exaggeration.
David: Well, not huge like a Gates Foundation thing.
Betsy: I wish. We started in 2005 with 26 volunteers going to Guatemala to
work with this organization that works with the people who scavenge
in the Guatemala City garbage dump. The dump is in a ravine. It
started in the early '50s and as it has filled up around the edges
they put a couple layers of sand on it and let it sit for a bit and
then the people build houses on it out of scraps and things that
they made.
This organization called Potter's House that we work with has been
working with them for 26 years. They have an education program,
micro-enterprise and health and various things that they do. Since
2005 we've been sending volunteer teams. We're not the only ones
sending volunteer teams down there to build houses and do
healthcare and do stuff with the kids. So we started with 26 and by
the end of the year we'll be well over 150 volunteers. We'll have
three weeks this summer, I'll have 135 over three weeks this
summer.
It started in our backyard and one of the reasons that we wanted
to...It started in the church and we started the organization
partially because it's easier to raise money if you're not a church
and it's also easier to make the volunteer opportunities available
to people. If you say "Oh I'm going to Guatemala." "Oh I'd love to
go with you! Who's going?" "It's my church." "Oh."
But, if it's this local non-profit it's more appealing and we've
really succeeded in doing that because we have people not only from
in our own community, but this year we're going to have a family
from Oklahoma, about six families from Texas, several people from
Florida.
David: You got the Virginia.
Betsy: Virginia. It's like oh my goodness. How is this happening?
Kevin: And everyone goes out to Guatemala and does the [inaudible
01:22:31] ?
[cross talk]
Betsy: Yeah. We all meet in Guatemala. I have three teams. One each week,
and I'll be there the whole time and they'll come down and probably
each team will build two or three houses. They'll do medical
clinic, they'll do day camp for kids, soccer or baseball, sports
things.
They were about teenagers, so they love to do the...Everybody does
construction in the morning. Then, in the afternoon teenage girls
and some of the boys who want to do other stuff will help out with
these other kid-related activities. That's what I'm doing.
Kevin: My wife is in Africa this week and last doing something similar.
Betsy: Cool.
Kevin: Which is why I have to leave shortly to go get my kids.
[crosstalk]
Betsy: What part of Africa is she in?
Kevin: She did some stuff for Special Olympics. Then, they were helping
build something at a food bank. I don't know that much yet, because
she's not home yet.
Betsy: Cool.
David: That's terrific. She'll be changed.
Kevin: She keeps telling that she wished I could've come, and I do, too.
Betsy: You have this kid. [laughs]
Kevin: We've got the two kids. The six-year-old doesn't feed herself real
well.
[laughter]
Kevin: She can't drive to school.
David: Your annual budget has gone from 0 to what? Are you going to hit
about 150, 200,000 this year?
Betsy: It's over 300 already.
David: Oh, OK. [laughs] 300.
[laughter]
Betsy: It's small potatoes compared to...
[crosstalk]
Betsy: As my boss, the Chairman of the Board, and I'm the only employee,
is fond of saying, "The people out there don't realize that we're
just a bunch of schlumps sitting around a table making this stuff
up as we go along. Very good leadership. He's a very good leader.
David: We were trying to maybe see if we can touch base with the Gates
Foundation when we were up there. [laughs]
Betsy: We got a brochure into his hands.
[laughter]
David: Yeah, we got a brochure into his hands and some other stuff.
Kevin: Was Bill Gates there?
David: Oh, yeah. I had a picture of him that I had taken at the first
Altair convention in 1976, before he had actually made the deal
with Altair to develop BASIC. He had said, "I can do it," but they
hadn't signed the whole thing. I've got a picture of him as a 20-
year-old or thereabouts, talking at this little convention.
Kevin: You showed it to him?
David: Yeah. I gave him a copy. The problem I had is that...some people
keep everything. I pretty much give everything away.
Betsy: Oh, you are lying. You keep everything.
David: I do keep a lot of stuff. [laughs]
Betsy: Then, you give it away later. [laughs]
David: Yeah. Well, when Stan Freiberger was putting together the "Fire in
the Valley" book, I gave him a lot of photographs and I gave him
the originals. Then the publisher said, "It's not good enough. The
photo. You get the negative." OK, they're gone. Never any of that
came back. In fact, what I had to do is scan the photo from the
book to make the print to give to Bill.
Kevin: Photos of being young and cute.
Betsy: That was his Woody Allen phase. He looked exactly like Woody Allen
did at that phase in his life.
Kevin: [inaudible 01:26:30] too.
Betsy: I'm sure there is.
Kevin: It is a lot [inaudible 01:26:33] .
David: She improves with age. Every year.
Kevin: I saw the picture! You look the same.
[laughter]
David: Anyway, the instant Paul Allen showed up, of course, everybody's
mingling around this museum. All of a sudden there was like an
arrow head over in that direction.
Betsy: There was this sucking sound.
David: And then Bill shows up and, oh my God, everybody has to go see
Bill.
Betsy: I was talking to Bob Rynett this morning, the guy who organized it,
and he said, "Oh, Paul was very happy. Paul was very pleased with
the way the event went." He said his only regret was that he and
Bill didn't have enough time to spend with the people. And I'm
thinking, "Well, OK, if you just stayed a little longer."
[laughter]
David: Well, at least Paul Allen did come to the dinner.
Betsy: Yeah, he stayed a little longer, but Bill, he was in and out like
a...
David: Bill was there for maybe an hour.
Kevin: He just showed up because he had to.
Betsy: Yeah, exactly. It was a cameo.
Kevin: [inaudible 01:27:52] cameo there?
Betsy: Oh, yes. There I am. I was thinner then. Oh! There's Ted in his
hat! And Peter [inaudible 01:28:02] . Who's that guy?
David: Dick Heiser was at the convention and he had one of the hats. The
Xanadu hat.
Betsy: He was wearing one of those hats. The rings were actually silver.
Oh and there's Johnny Anderson. He's the one that wrote that
crazy...
This was our building.
David: That was the greenhouse garage building that we started. [laughs]
Betsy: And there was a hole. Was it you or my brother that made a hole in
the wall for an air conditioner?
David: It was your brother.
Betsy: And the building was painted white after...
Kevin: Is that the air conditioner? You comment about the low tech air
conditioning.
Betsy: No, that was in an actual window. This building had been painted
white after and right about here a hole had been made in the wall
for this through-the-wall air conditioner. It was rented and when
we moved out, we had this hole in the wall. So, my brother takes
this spare ceiling panel that we had. It was white and sort of
stuffed it in the hole and filled it up so that it really didn't
show any more. We never heard any more about it.
David: That building today is...
Betsy: They've made it very fancy.
David: Oh my gosh! It's a boutique shop and it's really nice. And they
didn't even tear it down. It wasn't a tear-down and rebuild. At any
event, we were not into spending money on facilities. Absolutely
not. The last place that we were in was a printing company had
owned it and they had taken three very small houses that backed up
to railroad tracks and then they built a large warehouse at the end
that was relatively modern. Then they just connected the three
houses with little walkway and so we were in the first house.
Betsy: You couldn't tell that it was two houses.
David: No. The art department was in the second, then the software group
was in the third one. We had our fulfillment and storage and stuff
in the warehouse.
Kevin: How much money did you spend on the facility?
Betsy: Not much.
David: We were spending money on expansion, growing, grow, grow. Then Ziff
Davis comes in, they say, "You got this wonderful warehouse."
Kevin: It's our warehouse now, right?
David: That's right.
Betsy: It wasn't though, because you owned it.
David: I know, but in any event, they said we're going to use it. We're
moving some of your operation, advertising, sales into New York,
therefore you will have more space. It wasn't the trade-off of the
same kind of space or anything. What they did is, they have all
these other magazines at that point, things like "Popular Boating"
and "Yachting" and everything else. All of those magazines, when
you subscribed you got a premium. You got a tote bag or something.
Betsy: A backpack or a cushion.
David: Yeah. They moved all of their premium fulfillment out to our
warehouse. They said, "Because you're not going to have a software
department anymore, so you won't have to ship any software. We're
going to bring all of our premiums out there." We still have
"Yachting" bags.
[laughter]
David: Yachting bags and seat bags.
Betsy: Speaking of fulfillment that was something that we did. We were
real pioneers in doing our own fulfillment.
[crosstalk]
David: That's true...
Betsy: All magazines then used fulfillment houses. You would just send all
the little cards and white mail and everything to your fulfillment
house and they would just take care, enter it.
Kevin: Reader service cards and...
[crosstalk]
Betsy: Exactly, and then they would send the labels.
David: Everything went either to Boulder, Colorado, Des Moines, Iowa, or
some place in Florida.
Kevin: So when you say pioneers, does that mean you were cheap?
Betsy: Well no, because we were not getting good service, we weren't happy
with the service the readers were getting. And so we decided to
bring it in it house, and we brought a program from a company in
Boston that had written a program to run a PDP11.
And we did we brought the whole thing in-house. We had our own data
entry people. Did all the caging, taking the money out in-house.
Printed our own labels and ship, because then you had to print them
and ship them because there was no electronic delivery.
David: You know we were real pioneers there and we did spent some money.
Because PDP1170 was not a low-end, with a platter and disk, 12
inch, maybe 15 inch, but a big, big platter drive, and data entry
terminals, deck writers, BTO5. And when Ziff came in, I mean they
were blown away that we were doing our own fulfillment, and doing a
very efficiently.
And the other thing we were doing also was the reader service
cards. We were doing all our own processing of that. The same
computer is same system. A Mini Data System, that's what it was.
Betsy: No.
David: No? OK.
Betsy: Mini data was the one you were using...
[Day 2]
David: A couple of the questions you asked yesterday got us to thinking
about things we probably should have mentioned or clarified.
Kevin: OK let's go, let me grab a pen.
David: One of the corrections, Betsy remembered better than I. the
embezzlement that we were talking about was actually 79 not 78 it
doesn't make a lot of difference but was a year later. It was a
year after I had left my day job, and I was really depending upon
Creative Computing for my income and everything else. So to lose
that was a big blow at that time.
Kevin: So that could have been the end of things right there?
David: Yes absolutely it could have.
Betsy: It was 79 not 78, is what you're saying.
David: That's what I said it was 79 not 78.
Kevin: I was going to ask you to move closer to the microphone.
Betsy: Actually I don't have to do this. My ego is completely uninvolved.
I would go sit and play with the cats.
Kevin: Please, please be here. You supplement Dave's memory.
David: Yes exactly she's very good at that.
[crosstalk]
Betsy: I want to know, how are you going to know how to spell things? He
used the name John Dilks. If you go to write it out, how do you
know how to spell John Dilks?
Kevin: I'll either Google it, and if it's not in Wikipedia, I'll have to
come back to you and ask, or if they're mentioned in the magazines.
I'll do my best.
Betsy: I'm not saying it in a critical way, I'm just impressed that you
don't ask.
Kevin: I just feel this way, I can have everything. I don't have to write
it down. I can concentrate on the conversation, rather than taking
notes.
David: OK. One thing I thought would be kind of worthwhile...putting the
whole era of the early computer magazines into a perspective. In a
sense, personal computing itself went through several eras as it
accelerated and became so widespread. It certainly didn't start
that way.
You almost have to look at a period before there were personal
computers -- the pre-personal computer era, which I would say would
be 1972 or so up through '75, when the first computers came out.
What was happening then was you had big time-sharing systems.
Then, manufacturers like DEC and HP were making smaller time-
sharing systems for terminals on a computer. Specifically, Bob
Albrecht opened up People's Computer Company down in San Carlos,
San Mateo, one of the "Sans." It was an open to the public place.
What were people going to do with computers? Well, he wrote this
book of what to do after you hit return, of games.
Then I wrote my book, not for his center, but for people in the
east that had access to the same type of things on DEC computers.
Those two books actually came out in '72. That was well
before....There was an impetus for people to use computers. Even
though it was mini-computers and they didn't really have their own,
they did have access.
That, I think, was an important thing because, then, when the kit
computers first came out, which is '75, we really had the kit
computer era from '75 to around '78. That's when it primary was,
the do-it-yourself, build-it-yourself.
Who did those computers appeal to? It was largely people who were
OK with things like soldering guns. That was largely HAM radio
people. You look at "73" magazine and "Radio Electronics," those
were the ones that dragged the hardware people into the field, and
"Popular Electronics," of course, with the Altair in January, '75.
You had to know something about, and be a little bit capable with
your hands to get into it. That continued but dwindled off by 1980,
because of course, in '78, you had the three biggies, not biggies,
but self-contained, assembled computers: the Commodore PET, TRS-80,
and the Apple all came out in '78. They were proprietary platforms,
nobody was sharing stuff.
Actually, the S-100 bus was more shareable. More people got a card
that you could plug into the S-100 bus. There was more, but on the
other hand, you had to build it. That was really a stumbling block
for a lot of people. Then processor technology with the SAL. OK,
here's an S-100 bus machine, but it's all built. That was a big
leap.
Anyway, you had the, what I call, proprietary era from '78 to '82.
Then it kind of dwindled off, although Apple certainly kept going.
When the IBM PC came out, '81, '82, '83, that ushered in the
standardization era. Everybody, "OK, we're going to make an IBM PC
clone." It was really only Apple, and to a lesser extent, the Atari
and the Commodore that kept going with their own proprietary stuff.
They really couldn't keep going.
At that time, we started working with Atari. They using the same
chip that Apple had. I thought, "Man, that's an opportunity. Why
don't they just make an agreement with Apple to run Apple software
and everything." They got a 6502, that family of chips in there,
why not? But that wasn't Atari's way of doing things, as you well
know.
In any event, they went through those stages. As a new one came
along, the other one died off. That though then affected the
magazines, Creative Computing, we came from the pre-era, in a
sense. From the education applications and people having access to
small, minicomputer time sharing systems. When Altair basic was
announced, then it was the obvious thing that we would port over
programs to that.
Other magazines such as "Byte" and some of the hardware magazines,
they really came from the HAM radio end of things. Wayne Green, who
started "Byte," was publishing "73," which was the biggest magazine
in HAM radio. HAM fests were one of the earliest places where
computers were, or at least hardware, do-it-yourself computers were
really seen and popularized. Wasn't till a little later that we had
computer festivals.
The real early computer festivals in '75, '76, had a big overlap
with Ham radio. The early ones in New Jersey. That was the earliest
ones. It was, I think, more, not more, but at least half was
oriented to Ham radio. Then, it broadened out, of course, with more
applications being reproduced. Anyway, I think it's kind of
important to know how things fit into that whole scheme of things.
Magazines either came from the Ham radio and hardware side of
things. They had a different perspective than those like Creative
Computing.
Well, Peoples' Computer Company, Bob Aldberg, could have had a real
winning magazine, but he was too much in the alternative mode. So,
Peoples' Computer Company never really made it as a magazine. He
didn't want to do advertising or anything that would...
Kevin: That was a different avenue. It was more like a tabloid-style
newspaper.
David: Newspaper, yes.
Kevin: It was more glossy.
David: Exactly.
Kevin: It was a very different field.
David: Yeah. Again, magazine publishing. I remember, early on, I was on a
TV show. McNeil Lehrer Report on Public Broadcasting. Life Magazine
was being re-launched and Time-Warner was spending a ton of money
on this re-launch. They had the publisher of Life Magazine.
Betsy: It was probably Time-Life back then. I don't think it...
[crosstalk]
David: Yeah. That's right. It wasn't Time. Well, I think it was close to
the time that they merged. Anyway. Yeah. It was Time-Life. Then,
they had me. Sort of the opposite extreme.
Kevin: You're going to be covered in cat hair by the time you're here.
Betsy: Oh, I am sure.
Kevin: I'm sorry.
Betsy: It's OK. But it matches and sort of goes with it.
Kevin: Yeah. It matches fine.
Betsy: You have kind of a theme here. The black and white.
Kevin: Yes. Yes. Sorry to interrupt.
David: Anyway, they were interviewing both of us. They were going to spend
more money on their first issue than our entire annual budget, for
everything. The difference in big publishers, because we we're
talking about that a little bit yesterday, is huge. Really huge.
Now, the interesting thing is there was a magazine back then. I
don't know if it's still around today, called Folio. It was a
magazine for magazine publishers. They covered all aspects of it.
Subscription fulfillment, typesetting and everything else and the
business aspects of running a magazine.
They had some figures, which were true for a long period of time.
That one out of seven magazine startups makes it for one year. One
out of seven. That's low. Of those, one out of seven makes it for
five years. So, were talking about...
Kevin: I think Wayne told me almost the exact same statistic.
David: Yeah. One out of 50 new magazines makes it for five years or more.
Kevin: Right.
David: Once you make it five years, you're probably good to go for awhile.
[laughter]
The new Life Magazine comes back, roaring back in. Where are they
today, or even 10 years later from that point. Gone. Didn't make
it. In any event, yesterday we were talking a little bit about
where did we put all our money.
Kevin: Mm-hmm.
David: Well, all our money wasn't an awful lot compared to big publishers.
We were a small player. We're big in that field, but...
Kevin: You're a big fish in a little bowl.
David: Yeah. Yeah. There wasn't a lot. Betsy reminded me this morning that
one of the things we did to, in a sense, keep control, is we bought
our own typesetting equipment.
Betsy: Used of course.
David: Huh?
Betsy: Used.
David: Used. Yes. We didn't want to send stuff out to a typesetter
where...what did you [inaudible 00:14:22] ?
Betsy: It was the same thing with the fulfillment. You are sending it to a
service that gives your work to a minimum wage person who couldn't
care less. Puts her time in and...
Kevin: Plus you still had code and things that needed to be done right.
Betsy: Done right. Yeah.
Kevin: Otherwise it was useless.
Betsy: Yeah. We didn't typeset the code usually. We would actually pace
down the printouts. Part of it was for efficiency and probably, in
the long run, it was cheaper. Just to turn your typesetting around,
send it out and wait for your galleys to come back. Then you
proofread them. Then you'd send it back. Then they make the
corrections maybe and you get it back again. So we said, well...and
then we got this used, copy graphic was it?
David: Mm-hmm. Yep.
Betsy: Typesetter. Found a young woman who knew typesetting and hired her.
We bought our own stat camera. We always used to have to send all
the stats and [inaudible 00:15:34] out to be made.
[crosstalk]
David: That was huge then before...
Betsy: Had our own darkroom.
David: ...everything was computerized publishing. Yeah. We had our own
darkroom and our own stat camera with the thing that goes over a
screen basically to make it into dots.
Kevin: Right.
David: To do that. To make those negatives or [inaudible 00:15:56] , which
are the positive. That was something again. You sent it out and you
get it back.
I said, "Oh, you know what, we got a little more type here than
expected. We want to crop this. Well, we send it out again, and oh
my gosh." Doing all of that in-house, but it cost money. In a
sense, just for the hardware and capital improvements that you
needed to do that.
We were spending it on that and expansion into other things like
the software. One of the other ones that I was thinking of that we
did, that certainly, really didn't bring us any tangible reward,
was that we were doing some consulting when we started developing
software. We started doing consulting to places like the
Exploratorium in San Francisco. And Sesame Place. That was a big
one for us.
Sesame Place was a theme park right in our own backyard in New
Jersey. They were going to have these terminals that you could go
up to. One of the programs was Mix and Match the Muppets. You could
take different parts of Muppets and combine them. We wrote a part
of that routine and a whole bunch of stuff that made computers and
these things not computers but approachable things for kids.
We did some work for the Capital Children's Museum in Washington
and Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Again, did it help us?
Maybe. Did we gain a little reputation? Maybe. Did it translate to
the bottom line? Probably not. As Betsy said, it was fun for you to
do that, wasn't it?
Betsy: Yeah, it was fun. It gave him fun things to do.
David: That was one way that we, in a sense, spent some money.
Kevin: It makes sense. You guys were the computer experts, probably by
orders of magnitude. Who are they going to go to?
David: That's right. Interactive games, yeah. I already had a good selling
book out there that was visible, known. We did a lot of that kind
of stuff. Some of it was just fun to do. Another place where we put
I won't say a lot of money but we went to a lot of these shows,
well, there were some that were strictly personal computer shows,
but then also tried to push into things like the consumer
electronics show.
We were the only magazine at the consumer electronics. That's a
huge, huge show. Twice a year, one in Chicago and one in Las Vegas.
We'd take the smallest booth that you could but, still, it was a
fair chunk of change to go to that, but that's how I felt we got
the reach. They were pushing at a lower level. That was video games
mostly at that point. Although we weren't in that market, I just
felt that that was someplace that we wanted to be.
Kevin: Do you think that was worthwhile?
David: I don't know. We were mainly looking for retail stores to sell the
magazine. That was my main purpose for going there. No, it probably
wasn't. It probably was not and it cost us a lot of money to go to
the shows. You have to experiment and do those things. We started
reporting on new developments at the consumer electronics show and
there was some overlap with Computer Inc but it was mostly video
games. No, it didn't have a real good payoff. [laughs]
Then there was the Boston show we went to where Betsy's feistiness
really came out. You go to those shows. I'm not talking about one
of these local computer shows or something. You go to a big show.
You've got to use union labor. We had a computer at our booth. We
wanted to plug it in. You're going to plug in your computer? No,
you can't plug it in. You've got to hire an electrician for an hour
for $75 to plug in your computer.
Betsy: That was a bit extreme. I don't think that was actually true.
David: I don't know how much it was but you had to use union labor for
different things. Betsy took exception to that at one show and
actually came to blows.
Betsy: I was carrying stuff off the show floor. We were trying to get out.
It was in Boston and we were going to drive back and we were trying
to...
Kevin: Go home at the end of the show?
Betsy: ...go home at the end of the show. We were just carrying our
cartons of leftover magazines and books and some union guy comes to
me and starts telling me you can't do this and he was being very
rude. So I punched him in the arm. [laughs] They were not happy.
Kevin: Did you have to hire a special punching person to do that?
Betsy: Yes, exactly. I should have consulted with the shop steward before
doing that.
David: There was a follow-up to that. I'm not absolutely sure but I think
the guy that was running that show was Shelley Adelman. He then
approached us after that little incident. You can't do this. Betsy
was really in his face about come on. We're a tiny little nit. Sure
we can do it. We can carry our own stuff.
Shelley Adelman, whose name you probably heard today, in a sense,
got his start by running these smaller shows around the country and
then he built up to running PC Expo in New York and Las Vegas and
then he got into you run a show in Las Vegas you've got to make
deals with the hotels and so on.
The earlier PC shows in Las Vegas did not use the convention
center. They were held in I think probably the Hilton. He got to
know hotel people there and he started buying into hotels and today
Shelley Adelman is huge. Not Caesars but he owns one of the really
big casino operations. He's on Forbes list of top 100 wealthiest
Americans.
Kevin: I'm sure he only uses union labor.
David: I'm sure he does, absolutely. [laughs]
Betsy: That's how he got where he is.
David: We've crossed paths with some interesting people in different ways.
There was another one I was thinking of. Actually, this is jumping
around a little bit. Editorial, in different people submitting
articles and then some people I would ask would you do something
for us early, early on. That's another thing we went to. I went to
comic cons and the sci-fi cons to promote the magazine.
Betsy: That was early.
David: That was early, very early. I've got to tell you one little
incident there. I also went to small press publisher conventions. I
went to one over Labor Day weekend, and I don't know what year it
was. It was probably '75, '76 maybe. The place that they gave this
small press to exhibit was one platform up in the subway under
Lincoln Center.
Lincoln Center, of course, huge, but down one level is not shops.
There may be a few shops but it was a big, open platform. That's
where we were exhibiting. I had my magazines out there on a table
and I was talking to these other underground publishers and so on,
typical.
Betsy: That's why they put you there. It's underground.
David: Underground, yes. It was a Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Saturday,
Sunday, Monday. I said, "I can't be here on Sunday." Talked to the
person next to me and I said, "I'm just going to leave a cigar box
that says put your money in the box." He said, "You're nuts. We're
in a New York subway system. You're going to come back with nothing
in your box." I left a bunch of change in it.
Kevin: And your ex-wife said you were too trusting.
David: [laughs] Yes. I left like 15 single dollar bills in there so people
could make change and I just left it there, from Saturday to Monday
and I came back Monday, about $40, $50 in the box. I don't know
whether it paid for everything that was taken but it worked out
fine. Yes, I was obviously too trusting, but at roughly the same
time there was something going on. I think it was a sci-fi
convention or world future society. Yeah, it was world future
society convention.
They had some notable people there. I was sitting down with Alvin
Toffler in the lobby of the Colosseum and along comes over to us
Isaac [inaudible 00:27:03] . What a wonderful little party. We had
some coffee in the Colosseum and I said, "Isaac, can you write me
an article?" "I got a good story from the iRobot series that hasn't
been widely used or published and you can use that." So I got an
early contribution from Isaac [inaudible 00:27:27] and Alvin
Toffler wrote something for us.
Anyway, got to know some interesting people at that point. Then who
should submit an article, and by this time Betsy was the editor...
Betsy: Out of transom comes an article from Michael Creighton. It was a
program. I can't remember what it was about.
David: For the Apple.
Betsy: It was a program for the Apple, but it was something really dumb.
David: I don't know if you remember, we were reminded when Harry Garland
was up at the thing in Seattle. Harry Garland was one of the first
ones to produce an independent manufactured a board, a 100 bus
board, for the Altair, and this was really early, and he called it
the TV Dazzler. It made little squares light up but he could make
lots of them light up in different colors or just a few. It was a
silly program but people said we can do graphics on this.
He eventually developed it into quite an interesting graphics tool,
I guess. People did buy the TV Dazzler for itself but the purpose
was here's a board you could produce graphics, do some graphics. In
any event, that's essentially what Michael Creighton's program did
for the Apple. Not much.
Betsy: This was not early on.
David: Yeah, it was after the Apple 2 was out.
Betsy: It was probably...
David: '80.
Betsy: 1980, yeah.
Kevin: Did you publish it?
Betsy: No. I rejected it. [laughs]
David: I'm like we're going to reject an article from Michael Creighton?
Betsy: We both liked Michael Creighton as an article.
David: Oh my gosh. But we did. We really did. We had standards.
Betsy: Later on, though, he wrote something. It was better. It wasn't
great. He did write something better and we did accept it.
Kevin: Orson Scott Card wrote for Compute, I think. I don't know if he was
Orson Scott Card at that point, but [inaudible 00:30:00] .
David: We've crossed paths with some people.
Betsy: [inaudible 00:30:09] was actually very nice
David: Yeah, 6 foot 8, big guy. He was very nice. Unfortunately, he died.
On the other end of things, early on, we really were...this was
probably even before Betsy got in...kind of in the small press
underground publishing movement as much as in the legitimate big
magazines, because that's kind of where I started.
Betsy: When I came, we had just published the first sleek, coated paper
magazine and coated stock. In October 1978, I believe, that was
published. That was the first of the coated stock. That was kind of
the bridge to legitimacy.
David: For the first two years, [inaudible 00:31:09] news print and I had
a little tie in with some of the small press people. I was learning
about publishing from small press review, I got to know some of the
people who were doing successful publishing. A lot of them were
magazines and comics out of San Francisco.
So I got to know a little bit [inaudible 00:31:46] and Gilbert
Shelton and Sherry Flannigan, and some of those early, Bobby
London. So anyway, one ad we ran real early on was an adaptation of
Renee and Robert Crompton. Go ahead and change my thing to creative
computing. Go for it. Sherry Flannigan she did a comic strip called
Tronch and Bonnie, Tronch was a little dog and Bonnie was a little
girl and they occasionally got mixed up with a robot dog.
Kevin: Was there some sort of falling out with that person?
David: With Sherry? No. I'm still friends with her on Facebook. They had a
major, major problem, she was involved with Gary Hallgrin and I
forget who the publisher was, McNeil, Bobby London. They were the
Air Pirates funniest group that Disney took to task, that caused
the death of a lot of publishing in the underground comics
movement.
Kevin: I don't understand.
David: Air Pirates were funny, they were just looking for trouble. They
had Disney characters flying planes and getting into all kinds of
trouble and getting into problems that Disney characters never
would have done, sexual problems as well as just acting badly.
Kevin: [laughs]
David: Disney just said, "We can't put up with this." It was an
interesting case, because was it a copyright violation, not really
because they were character look-a-likes, but they weren't calling
them Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck but they looked the same or very
similar. But, it was a landmark case in underground comics, it
caused a lot of them to pull back, a lot on the satire and stuff
that they were publishing.
Kevin: I asked about Sherry because a number of years ago when I had first
put the best of [inaudible 00:34:29] on my website, then after a
while I got an email saying, "Look, you have to take this
[inaudible 00:34:37] ." I would copyright all, it was just like
waving arms. So I took it down but it was, I thought, maybe it
was...
David: Well that whole copyright trademark thing, there interpretation
that really, really strict...everything that goes on the Internet
is a public domain. Well, that is not really true either. Are you
making money from copyrighted material? If you are then that's a
pretty clear violation. Are you affecting the copyright owners
ability to make money with it? That's a violation.
I'm kind of in this right now with Uruguay and TinTin, those books
have inspired a lot of people to make parodies and fake TinTin
covers. TinTin at the beach, places TinTin wouldn't normally go.
Well is it affecting the sales of TinTin books, or is it actually
increasingly them?
Casterman, who owns and [inaudible 00:36:07] owns the TinTin
copyrights. They are really going after some of these people, but
I'm not sure that they have a really good case. So some people take
everything off and don't want nothing on the website. And others
are saying, "Hey, this is legitimate." I have collected a lot of
those covers, and put them up on a website.
Betsy: I guess you'll find out soon enough.
David: I will find out, soon enough.
Kevin: They may not be right legally, but how hard do you want to fight
it.
[crosstalk]
David: I think that they have to demonstrate that it's hurting them in
some way. One last thing, from the question you asked yesterday,
back to the money issue, when I sold the magazine, right at that
time I took 15 percent of what I had received, and donated it to
charities. I have in a sense signed on, although not as an official
signee to the Gates-Buffet initiative to give away half of my
wealth, while I am alive.
At one point in time you can compute that, I have already given
away more than I have received for Creative Computing to Charity.
Of course, it had grown a little bit and we made reasonably decent
investments and that is why it continued to grow. But, I'm really
committed to doing that. My kids are not going to inherit it all.
That's just the way it is, that is the way I believe. Put my money
where my heart is. Anyway,
Kevin: Other question is, you said something yesterday, I should follow up
that one. You said something about stealing Basic.
Betsy: Well there was this big thing. Just the night before last, at this
dinner we went to, where all the people who were at the first MITS
conference and they referred to the letter that Bill Gates wrote.
Kevin: "Why are you stealing my software?"
Betsy: Well exactly. That was just a reference to that Bill Gates, which
had just been brought back to my memory by that. People were
telling stories at this. Instead of having an after dinner speaker
they were just passing the mic around and people were talking about
incidents and things from the past.
Kevin: Did you get to sell the story to this group of...?
David: Not really, I was just followed up on something [inaudible
00:39:24] .
Betsy: Some of those stories were really boring.
[crosstalk]
David: Oh yeah, long and boring. It's an interesting thing though, about
basic itself, but it was developed at an educational institution
originally by Kemeny and Kurtz at Dartmouth. And they, either
deliberately or because they had gotten a lot of grant money from
General Electric in the early time sharing systems, they basically
let anybody use their Basic.
It was developed at Dartmouth but later Honeywell put a system in
at Minnesota or Florida or someplace else. They could use Basic,
they could have a no license fee or anything. That made Basic a
universal language that was available, at least that version of
Basic. If you write a different version of Basic, where does that
fall? These are some sort of violation and you need some
permission. And basically Kemeny and Kurtz said, "No, you don't."
And they allowed Basic to be used and developed by others.
Digital Equipment, at the same time, maybe even earlier, but
roughly the same time, had developed also an interactive language
called Focal. And Focal in many regards was more efficient than
Basic, because they were running it on many computer and there was
less memory to work with. On the other hand, and this was true
Digital...as time went on, they said, "No, nobody can use Focal. We
are not going to let, especially those people [inaudible 00:41:59]
." But any place else, nobody could use Focal.
I think it wound up with a situation like Sony and Betamax. Sony
saying, "Betamax is ours and it is a better format that VHS," which
it was. But then, JVC saying, "We have VHS and Toshiba. Hey do you
want to use it? Fine, we'll license it to you for next to nothing."
Kevin: You think Focal could have been Basic.
David: I think it could have been very big. I think it could there could
have been very serious competition between the two languages, but
by Digital limiting it only to their own computers and specifically
to their mini computers, not even the big mainframes, it really
limited the spread of Focal. In fact, it forced me to go out to the
developers and people in educational institutions they wanted
Basic.
There were few schools and colleges in Boston area, near Deck that
were OK with Focal. But stuff was getting published by Minnesota
Educational Computer Consortium and others in Basic, [inaudible
00:43:32] computer project. So they wanted Basic. [laughs] I had to
go on. I hired one group, actually it turned out to be just an
individual guy in Brooklyn that developed a Basic for 4KPDP8. Well
Basic took 3.5K, I gave you 500 words, 512 bit not even the 16 bit,
at least get 2 bits per...but 500 words the right programs. Wasn't
much.
So that forced Lunar Lander and [inaudible 00:44:15] and some of
those programs actually. Some of them I imported over from Focal
into Basic. And then we had a machine that had 8K. We had a
different version of Basic because Hewlett Packard had a machine
that read cards, mark sense cards. We had to have a different
version of basic for that. Then we had a timeshare Basic. We had
six versions of Basic, five actually on the PDP8 family. It was
absurd, it was crazy, but we had to do it.
Kevin: I was going to ask you, the process of like...you started
saying...you interrupted yourself. You said, "People would submit
articles and then..." I don't know what you were going to say next.
But [inaudible 00:45:08] that I wanted to ask you like just the
process of how the magazine got made. You got an article was,
somebody just typed up or something and...
Betsy: You mean the mechanics of the production?
Kevin: Yeah.
Betsy: We can receive most of the articles for the magazine came over the
transom. And we would get these articles and our editorial system
would log them in and pass them around to editorial staff. John
Anderson and Russell [inaudible 00:45:42] .
David: Peter Fee.
Betsy: Peter Fee.
Kevin: What does it mean over the transom?
Betsy: Means they weren't solicited. Somebody in the middle of the night
jumped to know [laughs] or through the mailbox. We put a little
piece of paper on there and the guys would write their opinions.
David: [laughs] That is serious.
[crosstalk]
Betsy: Some of the things they said. [laughs]
Kevin: Like what? What would they say?
Betsy: "Don't quit your day job." [laughs]
David: And then they had the rubber stamp.
Betsy: Somebody found a stamp. Everything that we had was used, including
our desk and everything. And somebody found, at the back of the
desk, a stamp. It said San Marcos on it. This was like the ultimate
insult. [laughs] San Marcos, like you know, "Get out of here."
[laughs]
Kevin: Send it to San Marcos?
Betsy: Send it to San Marcos, wherever that was. Ultimately, I would make
the final decision whether we were going to publish this or not.
Once we were well established, the vast majority of them went back.
We never returned manuscripts. And they would come with piles of
code. A lot of them were programs and, we would decide and the
editorial assistants job to notify the person. Then we bought all
rights, didn't we?
David: Mm-hmm.
Betsy: North American Serial rights, that's what we bought for everything.
Then they would go into a cube. Sometimes we would say something,
"Oh, this is going to go really well with this educational
institute that we're doing in June," Like that one is for June or
just put it in the queue and we will see when it comes or rises to
the top or whatever.
The more technical editors like, John Anderson, he was our best guy
ever. They would go through the code and make sure the code worked,
and I would edit them for content and correct them.
David: For English and Grammar.
Betsy: Yeah, with a pen and pencil. Then they would go to our typesetter.
Typesetter would correct them. And then they would come back, and I
think, our lower level editorial assistant would proofread them,
but proofread a lot of them too. When they came out typesetter, it
was on a smooth shiny paper.
David: Photographic paper.
Betsy: And then, if they had screenshots or anything the art department
would make them into photo stats or [inaudible 00:49:02] . And then
when it was time for them to go to press they would put them on
boards, pieces of cardboard, white paper...
Kevin: So you paste up?
Betsy: Yeah, they do the paste up and put it on there.
David: The boards were using non reproducing blue on its photograph. They
had different outlines, blue defined columns, both two and three
column pages and upper limits and page numbers and all that kind of
stuff.
Kevin: We were still doing it on [inaudible 00:49:43] newspaper in 1990.
[laughs]
Betsy: Well that's exactly it, so you know what we're talking about. And
then once you get it all together and then again somebody has got
to read it to make sure there is no lines left out, particularly of
the programs. Make sure that those all still make sense. There were
many cases where line got left out or artists cuts off a things and
realizes, "Oh, I mean to cut it short." And that whole line
disappears and then you send it off to be printed and all the
subscribers get a little upset because Startrek doesn't run.
[laughs]
Kevin: So that sort of thing happened frequently or often?
David: With typeset material, not much at all. But with program listings,
program listings were really tough. Because you would have people
that would submit something, and they'd have a really cheap, low-
end dot matrix printer. And we always encouraged people, if you're
going to submit a program, submit it in some machine-readable form.
So we don't want to type them all in to make sure they work. Even
though our readers are going to have to, but we don't want to have
to do that. So send us. But even so, we might then print it off on
one of our slightly higher end printers. But I'll tell you what,
you have page breaks and everything else. And the Art department
didn't have a clue about programs and stuff. The program would get
stated down. We weren't using the full sized type for program
listings.
Betsy: Yeah. At that point we hadn't the ability to make them fit.
David: That's where the most common place that you'd lose a line or
something. It would get photographed, and when it's coming out of a
line printer, you might have one or two lines on the following
page. "Oh, we forgot that."
Kevin: Personally, I know it said so much about magazine that when it
continued, there were just sometimes a handwritten area going,
"Continued over here." [laughs]
Betsy: [laughs]
David: Oh, absolutely.
Betsy: That was a early.
Kevin: It wasn't professional, and that was awesome. It was just like,
"OK."
Betsy: Then what we would do, we would request when we...we would solicit
articles. Like if there was a new Apple peripheral that we wanted
to review, we'd get the product. Then a lot of times, our own guys
wanted to review the stuff, but if it was something that we didn't
have time for, or that was better suited to one of our freelancers,
we would send it out and ask for a review of it.
A lot of reviews came in over the transom too, but we tried to be
careful of those, that they were not either trying to justify their
own purchase of whatever it was or get even with the publisher for
producing it. [laughs]
Kevin: Or written by the... [crosstalk]
Betsy: That really wasn't an issue at the time, it was a more innocent
time. That really didn't happen much, but it was, sometimes, people
would get a product they didn't care for and totally bash it, then
we have to go and figure out is it really that bad. We tend to not
produce seriously negative...if it was a really bad product we just
ignored it.
David: We tried to be objective with reviews, but before I got into the
computer field at all I was in market research. There are a number
of biases, too, that really overwhelmingly affect all kinds of
market research polls or surveys. One is that people think they're
better than they are. For example, if we were doing a poll or a
research study, we'd put a question on basically designed to show
the executives who were using this data that there were some
biases.
Betsy: He's not talking about Creative Computing.
[crosstalk]
David: No, no. This was way earlier. I'm talking about Proctor and Gamble
products or general foods or that kind of thing. Anyways, the
question we put on was "please rank your driving ability," and we
had from well below average, accident waiting to happen up to Mario
Andretti, Danica Patrick, over there. And you know what, 99 percent
of the population ranked themselves better than the average. Where
is your average then? Its way high.
The other thing, equally pervasive in a sense, is that people
wanted to justify a decision, a purchase decision. In fact, back
the 30s, the slogan for Ford Motor Company was ask a man that owns
one. You ask a man that owns and has made a decision to buy this
car, he's going to say "Yeah, it is the greatest car." So you put
on questions, again, throwaway questions.
If you had this, or if you were an owner of whatever car it is that
you have. "What do you have now? Would you buy another one?" People
"Oh, yes. This is a great decision. I love this car." I'll tell you
where you can find out, is you look at what percentage of people
that did own that particular car did buy another one? They're
always way lower than they those that say they would buy another
one. It gets more pronounced with higher prices.
If you've made a decision to buy a high-priced car, you're going to
think, "I'll tell you what. This Land Rover was the best car I have
ever bought." 78 percent of people might say, "I'm going to buy
another one." About 15 percent of the people actually do.
Kevin: So [inaudible 00:56:49] magazine because people want to justify a
review.
David: Yeah. That's exactly right. And as Betsy said, it could go the
other way, too. "I think I'm getting screwed here with this product
and I'm going to knock it." When you get reviews, in essence, over
the transom, they're either justifying, "This was really wonderful.
I made a great decision buying this particular product," or "I hate
it." It's hard to know whether the review was really objective and
realistic.
Kevin: Do you ever push-back from advertisers?
David: All the time.
Kevin: Can you tell me?
Betsy: We would feel the pushback from our ad sales people. They would say
"So and so is annoyed with you because you didn't put it." We very
rarely put anybody's totally negative reviews, but we tried to be
objective, and not every product is perfect. Almost every product
is going to have some negative feature.
We would put those in and the advertisers would then go to their ad
rep and complain. Then the ad rep would come to us and say, "Why
are you doing this? These people are mad. I have to sell them ads."
We would just say "Separation of church and State. You are
advertising in this magazine because it's a credible magazine, and
if we let you push us around, it won't be credible anymore, and
then it will reflect on your ad."
Kevin: Do you remember anyone ever pulling ads [inaudible 00:58:39] ?
Betsy: I don't, offhand. Do you?
David: No, but I can tell you the opposite. There were a couple of
magazines that almost ran manufactured press releases as product
reviews. They did get more advertising than we did from some
manufacturers that liked that. I hate to name names, but Compute
Magazine. I don't think you'll find any negative reviews in Compute
Magazine. Everything was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Personal Computing, similar, very positive. "Gee whiz" reviews on
almost all the things that they saw. It just isn't that way.
Kevin: You have talked about [inaudible 00:59:49] . We've talked briefly
at least about the other magazines. Sync, the one about Timex
Sinclair. I understand the allure of publishing a magazine geared
to a specific system, but why did you pick Timex Sinclair? [laughs]
David: Probably two reasons. One is that we had more of a presence in
England than most of the other magazines.
Betsy: Still do.
David: We had a very early agreement with David Tebbet, who was the co-
publisher of Personal Computer, something-or-other. It might have
been Personal Computer World. Yes, it was.
Betsy Ahi: Yes it was Personal Computer World, and when PC world started they
had to call it PC World because there was already a Personal
Computer World in England.
David: And we had an agreement that they would reprint materials from
Creative Computing, which they did for a while but then they
developed their own in-house capabilities and there was enough
differences. We went to England and very early on had an agent in
England that we could take subscriptions.
Betsy: A housewife who kept her dark issues in her spare bathroom.
[laughs]
David: Yeah, we still know her. Hazel Greaves, Hazy. Anyway, so we were
getting enough subscriptions from England. We were sending over, I
don't know how they packaged them up, but they call them Mbags, M-
bags, mail bags basically of magazines, then we mail them from
England. So I had more of our connection with British market than
probably any of the other magazines, we definitely did.
And so I get to know Clarkson Clair and what's going on over there.
And then when they bring over the computer to this country and
Timex, my God, big outfit. They were going to market it. By that
time you know, there was no point starting a [inaudible 01:02:25]
magazine or an entire magazine. They were, Or Apple, they were
already existed. So maybe this is going to be the next big one. We
will be right there when they start and we were.
Timex actually put, what we had simple, simple sink or something
but it was in the package with the computer. So that was one way of
getting our subscriber base and we couldn't possibly afford to
advertise and do direct mailings for magazine like that. But they
were in essence helping us go on. So that's why it is pretty
successful actually. Often, we were making money on the magazine
mainly because we didn't have to promote it.
If we had to get subscriptions, we could not have possibly made it
work. There wasn't enough advertising really. I don't know what the
issue here was, but it was not as good as we would have liked it.
The magazine would have been tiny if we maintained the same
advertising to edit ratio we would have liked. But we didn't lose
money out of it but we didn't make anything out of it either. I
think it was a breakeven proposition.
Kevin: OK. Microsystems. [inaudible 01:04:09] .
David: I said there was a lot of early development in New Jersey and there
was a guy named Saul Libes, you will find him probably, [laughs]
who was the first president of the Armature Computer Group in New
Jersey. He was a Professor at [inaudible 01:04:43] College and he
felt that Byte magazine started out fine but then they were
focusing more on assembled hardware and things that were already
made.
So he wanted to get down on really lower level of do it yourself,
build it yourself. Microsystems was more like Byte was in the very
beginning, focusing on circuit diagram, this was logic in PC's and
everything.
Betsy: There first name was S100, Microsystems
David: Yeah, S100 perhaps then it became Microsystems in '78 or '79. When
some of the others came out they started [inaudible 01:05:45] 6800
and 68,000 chips from Motorola. But I would say it was a really
techy magazine and it was one that I think probably killed that one
off.
Betsy: It was dead before [inaudible 01:06:05] . [laughs]
David: It might have been. I don't know, but it was...
Betsy: S100 bus did not survive and to the [inaudible 01:06:12] .
David: It was dead before as there was these eras and the do it yourself
S100 era,that was '75 to '78. Then it kind of had a downward spiral
of two or three years and it was gone. Well, maybe it wasn't gone
but it wasn't the same. And so Microsystems was tuned into that and
they were running hardcore stuff.
And the reason that Saul...we reach an agreement with him to
publish it, is basically he didn't have any real magazine
background. We thought we could do something with it. It turned out
not to be a good fit bit we published it for a while. I don't know
if we made money or lost money on that. Probably it didn't make
anything. [laughs]
Kevin: Small business computers or computing.
David: What?
Betsy: Small business computers? Who do we buy that from? I can't even
remember. You can't even remember that we had it, I can tell by the
look on your face
David: I can
Betsy: That one of my brothers...my brother was a publisher remember?
David: Yeah, I don't know who or where we got it.
Kevin: That just fall into grave or...?
Betsy: Eventually, but that we post it for a while. I think is something
that somebody basically left on our door step.
David: Yeah
Betsy: I think it was kind of like a puppy on the... [laughter]
David: I think it came with your brother.
Betsy: No, because my brother wasn't into publishing until after clearing
college.
David: It sounded like a good idea at the time.
Betsy: I think we saw a future in business computing
David: Yeah, we did and unfortunately that was one word as if they just
want...I mentioned yesterday that they wanted to really shift the
focus of Creative Computing away from home and broaden out and
shifted into the small business market. And just did not, it was an
uncomfortable fit. We would've been better to have a separate
magazine.
Betsy: I don't remember where we got Small Business Computing from or
where it went.
David: I don't know, either.
Betsy: But I know that obviously it wasn't a huge acquisition.
David: It was a footnote.
Betsy: A footnote in the story. [laughs]
[laughter]
David: Actually, a bigger acquisition was earlier and that was Rom
Magazine. Rom was published by who?
Betsy: Erik Sandberg-Diment.
David: Right.
Betsy: D-I-M-E-N-T.
David: Connecticut. He did a nice job with the magazine, very nice job
with it. Published nine issues and a little different focus than
Creative but it really overlapped us very nicely. He had more
graphic stuff. In fact, it was through him that I got to know
George Baker and some of the people up there. The other guy that
did the pixelated blocks photos. You've seen those.
Betsy: The Einstein.
David: [crosstalk] The Lincoln with block pics.
Betsy: Block pics.
David: Block pics. OK, he and George Baker sort of came as a package with
Rom, they knew of each other. We actually, I would say, four or
five issues, ran Rom as a whole separate section and even set it on
the cover of Creative Computing and Rom. Then it became evident...
Betsy: I think that was because he had a whole other editorial kicking
around. [laughs]
David: Yeah.
Betsy: We bought.
David: Could be. And then we would just merge it in completely, but that
was a very good fit. It brought us more editorial than it did
subscribers. They did not have a big subscriber base, but it was a
nice marriage in a sense.
Kevin: Video and Arcade Games only published I think four issues.
David: Three.
Kevin: Three?
David: Actually, three but if you've got a hold of the third one, you're
doing well. I think Ziff cut that off after two real issues got
mailed out. We did a third one but it wasn't sent out to
subscribers.
Kevin: My website only has two issues.
David: Yeah. There were only two that really were distributed.
Kevin: So I have...
[crosstalk]
Betsy: A goal. [laughter]
David: Yeah, if you can get a hold of the third one. [laughter] I don't
even have that. There's a same thing on Tarry-on. There were three
issues of Tarry-on that I did not keep the third issue. Oh, man.
Shoot me.
Kevin: [laughs]
David: But Video and Arcade Games, there were at least five or six other
magazines focusing on that. Talk about magazines that were running
non-objective manufacture-provided reviews, all the others were. I,
maybe, convinced myself and some people at Davis that there was a
need for really objective...
Betsy: Ziff? Did Ziff do that?
David: Huh?
Betsy: Were we with Ziff when we did that?
David: Oh, yeah. That was a late one. So we said, let's...
Kevin: Continue it through.
Betsy: Yeah.
David: Yeah, that was definitely. Let's do it. But again...
Betsy: Not only that but it was going to be fun.
David: It was going to be a lot of fun. [laughter]
Kevin: So why did it fail?
David: OK, again you got to look at the eras and what was happening.
Arcade games then really were on the decline. Video arcades where
you go in and pop a quarter in, because there was so much more
capability in the home computers and the [inaudible 01:12:55] and
the Mattel and the different home systems. They could do all now,
not as much, but you get a pretty darned good game that you could
take home with you and not have to pop a quarter in the slot every
time you play.
So arcade games were kind of on the downward spiral, so that
eliminated a lot of potential advertising. We weren't going to get
any advertising from Nameco and all of the producers of the arcade
games, which was, "Hey, it is advertising along with..." And the
other home producers of the game, there were four or five magazines
already that they were pouring money into. They didn't really want
another one.
So it was advertising that or just lack of advertising that killed
that off. We just couldn't get it. I think there was still a need
for what we had sort of in a sense proposed to do of objectively
reviewing games and secondly, we're telling people how to play
them.
Betsy: Yeah, it was strategies.
David: Strategies. It was advertising that we just didn't have, couldn't
get.
Kevin: [inaudible 01:14:28] Atari explored and Atari I think we've covered
pretty well.
David: Yeah.
Kevin: Military vehicles, which we talked about.
David: [laughs] Yes.
Kevin: So the other magazines, Byte and [inaudible 01:14:45] , was it
rivalry? Was it friendly competition?
David: Byte, we were in bed together. Not in bed together, but we
published the best of Byte. Creative Computing did.
Betsy: For awhile.
David: Well, just one.
Betsy: No. That wasn't that friendly a rivalry. It wasn't that friendly
after awhile.
David: It wasn't friendly once they sold to McGraw Hill, and they sold
early. Then everything was off. We did some joint promotions with
Byte for hardware creative software. We ran the ads for each other
for a short time.
Betsy: That's when McGraw Hill cutoff.
David: Oh, yeah.
Betsy: [laughs] In a heartbeat. No more of that.
David: We felt that basically we weren't even competing for the same
advertisers. Just a few, but not really. Certainly, we were not in
direct competition at all with Byte. So that was just kind of all
in the same place and you're going in a hardware direction, we're
going on the software.
When Wayne Green threw this intrigue with his wife and everything
else, lost Byte Magazine. He was fit to be tied. "I'm going to kill
them!" and he started Kilobyte. It wasn't killable. It was Kilobyte
for I don't know how many issues.
Betsy: Not many.
David: 1000 bytes. [laughter] and a kilobyte, it had a dual meaning there.
Kevin: Yeah.
David: That was a ferocious and very nasty. Oh, horrible rivalry. Somebody
early on forced him not to use the name byte at all.
Betsy: So it was byte.
[laughter]
David: So they changed it to Kilobaud.
Betsy: Which didn't mean anything.
[laughter]
David: No.
Kevin: So did you have a relationship with Wayne?
Betsy: Nobody had a relationship with... [laughs]
David: Nobody really had a relationship. I knew him, of course. He was
going his own way. Now the one area actually where we got into more
competition with him than in the magazine itself, because again, he
was trying to be like Byte, hardware oriented and he published 73
magazines so he was basically focusing on the ham radio people, the
do it yourselfers and so on. But they started a software division.
It was pretty good. They had a lot of the same types of software
that we did on cassette tape.
In any event, we really had more of a head to head rivalry on the
software than in the magazine publishing. We never really had
anything to do with the magazine products or books. They also
published some books but more like the magazine hardware type of
thing. We weren't quite as selective, but our book publishing we
did get into things that weren't in the magazine. We published
books with more of a hardware orientation. We had a little broader
line of books than the type of things that we had in the magazine.
Kevin: I don't know if you want to open this can of worms, but you said to
me in an email, "You couldn't find two people whose vision,
philosophy, ethics, and view of business and life was further apart
than Wayne and I." Can you elaborate on that? [laughs]
Betsy: He was just basically unpleasant, is my take on him. I didn't know
him that well but it was just sort of like he had a chip on his
shoulder and was daring you to knock it off. Wouldn't you say?
David: Yeah.
Betsy: You knew him before I did but by the time I arrived on the scene
that was just sort of the general industry perception of him, I
think. It was just stay away from him, leave him alone, he's not
very nice.
David: Well, one other thing, which we sort of touched on a couple of
times, I'm very trusting. [laughter] Overly so, according to my ex-
wife and I think there would be a couple of examples. Wayne would
walk out of that door, boy, out of sight, 'you're going to do
something to screw him' is what his view would be. He did not trust
anybody.
Betsy: [laughs] And least of all, his ex wife.
[laughter]
David: It's the old saying, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean
that somebody isn't out to get you." He thought everyone was out to
get him, everybody. So we were totally philosophically different.
Our ways of doing business were different. I shake hands with you,
we have an agreement. You don't shake hands with Wayne.
Betsy: I don't think his employees were ever happy either.
David: Oh!
Betsy: You talked to them and it shows. He didn't have like a great...
David: Rapport.
Betsy: Well it was not. The culture of his organization I don't think was
particularly, I think it was probably permeated with this lack of
trust.
David: Well, one thing, we had fun. We really did have fun at Creative
Computing. Perhaps some of the editorial staff, too much. There was
one point where Betsy had to away their...
Betsy: Well they were all young guys. Some of them even still in high
school, they would play games for hours and hours and hours, long
after the reviews were done. It was one, self-contained thing that
played football, and they played it for hours. I had to take it
away from them. Like "don't make me be your mother"
Kevin: Was there any drug culture at all? If you read [inaudible 01:22:17]
and he was cocaine and high everyday and popped...
Betsy: Not that we knew of. [laughs]
David: The East coast was quite different.
Betsy: No there was nothing, really. I don't think so. In fact, my client
John Anderson and Peter Fee, they were actually kind of protective
of me in a lot of ways. I can remember being in John's office and
they were talking about a movie or something like that. John said,
"No, you wouldn't like this movie, don't go to this movie." That
kind of thing, they were funny guys. They just kept laughing. David
Lubar. They were free spirits but they were very funny, talented
guys.
David: He is coming out with a line of children's books, weird, weird
stuff. The last one, something about the lawn mower weenies. He has
a line of 6 or 8, and they're all little short stories. Some of
them were adaptations of stuff that almost got published in
Creative Computing, probably some of them did. Lubar is a funny
guy. When he left and went to work for one of the video gaming
companies, his first big successful game was "Worm Wars." You were
like, "Worm Wars?" [laughs]
Other people are fighting real serious warrior and you are fighting
with worms. We just had a different kind of culture, a lot of fun.
Betsy: Jonny Anderson went to work for A plus in San Francisco. He was one
of the five people killed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1986.
He was in a car and a piece of the building fell on the car. He was
a really funny guy.
David: We did not have a serious business culture.
Betsy: No, we had this great big room with a bunch of tables set up around
the edges, in the middle. It was kind of like that, nowhere near as
neat.
Kevin: I will clean that up for you.
Betsy: [laughs] Just tangles of wires, and we had to have one of every
kind of computer so we can test all the software, and this one
would be running this kind of peripheral, and it was like a young
guys dream job.
David: You commented yesterday about how we had a bunch of high school,
not quite, but still...
Betsy: I said that they were in their early 20s but they basically had the
maturity of high school students, they needed a little bit of
mothering. But I wasn't that myself. They were just really nice
guys, we did a good job hiring those kids.
David: When you talk about the Atari cultures and some of the others,
where every Friday some of these companies have parties, that kind
of thing. We had an annual party, a picnic. We didn't need weekly
parties and stuff to let you have fun because that stuff was going
on every day, not really partying but playing the games and
bantering and everything else.
As they say, at Washington, a real efficient business culture.
Heck, I didn't work for Digital Equipment, which was still a pretty
relaxed place, but AT&T which was anything but. This is as far away
from that kind of corporate culture as you can get, but it worked.
Didn't make a lot of money, but it worked.
Kevin: [inaudible 01:26:58]
Betsy: Yeah. And I think they appreciated it because they weren't making
tons of money either, but they were having a lot of fun. They
enjoyed going to work, they really enjoyed it.
Kevin: Speaking of Kindle, I've done it but haven't told anybody yet that
best of Creative Computing too is now available on Kindle. And I
have been working backwards. [crosstalk] I just had it on sale.
Betsy: [laughs]
Kevin: I haven't publicized it yet for sale.
Betsy: They won't let you do. [laughs]
Kevin: Yeah, I think they will have two.
David: Did you do that through Amazon? How do you convert is to Kindle?
I scan them and then I do CRM and I use Elance or utilize some
service in India that converts it back to ASCII, and then they
convert it into an E-book from there. It's a lot of work, I want it
done well, and I want it to be super awesome. And they just
[inaudible 01:28:40] , like we were talking about before.
Betsy: Yeah.
Kevin: Outsourcing and stuff. But I can do it myself but that would take
way too long. So I just try to do the quality control [inaudible
01:28:49] . It's not perfect but better than nothing.
David: I have reached the point where with my Dodge restoration book, that
yes, many of the borders around the pictures are terrible, they're
hand drawn and so on. But I'm not going to bother to re-do that, I
just want take the book, get it into some sort of machine readable
format, PDF or something. [inaudible 01:29:24] somebody that can...
Kevin: Yeah, I can get you off with that. We can then figure it out.
David: I found one extra one that I can cut up.
Kevin: That will help a lot. [inaudible 01:29:37] . If you want to sell a
PDF of it, that would be up in couple of day. That's easy, but a
searchable Kindle version that takes longer.
David: I don't want a Kindle version because people want to print out
something that they can...
Betsy: Take out to the garage
David: When people slide under the vehicle they have it there, "Oh, OK
this is what I should be looking for."
Kevin: If you scan it and upload it to Amazon, even create space from
[inaudible 01:30:06] company, then there could actually be another
book, that looks pretty identical to the first one. We will figure
out.
Do you [inaudible 01:30:23] ? But are you familiar with...?
Betsy: Are there any?
Kevin: There are but they are very different than Creative.
David: Somebody out there said, "What did you read today?" The only
magazines that I will occasionally pick up in the computer field
are mostly from England, Internet magazines, well there are
several, which is sort of interesting that the dominant Internet
magazines come from England, but they do.
If I want to do something, and I haven't lately, but I wanted to
get into doing something different or interactive or something with
my website. I'd pick up one of those magazines and kind of have
same kind of thing that Creative used to publish. Here is a code to
do it in Pearl or HTML, whatever.
I converted all of my website, quite a while ago, to XHTML from old
HTML. I did not like any of the programs that generate web pages,
mainly because...Well, today its probably OK, but I felt that
earlier on, they were very inefficient. You'd have this much code
for something and XHTML would write it in five lines.
My old-fashioned [inaudible 01:32:23] said, "You know what, the
interpreter or compiler or whatever, has to go through a lot of
that just to pick out what is going to be displayed." My web pages
are very compact and short. They are all XHTML, none of that is
extra [inaudible 01:32:41] style pages and everything else.
Anyway, so that's what I'll pick up a magazine for. I'm was doing a
little bit of programming in Pearl and then I said, "No. You know
what, I can get routines that I can download and I don't have to
learn it myself. I learned enough to know that I don't want your
Pearl program." [laughs] Or what is the other one? I don't know.
I'm right at the point now where I'm wanting to do some more things
that I can't, so I'll probably purchase some more computer
magazines and learn about it.
Betsy: Has anyone talked to you about the purchase of PC by Davis?
Kevin: Mm-hmm.
Betsy: This is a big story.
Kevin: Yeah.
David: She was involved.
Betsy: I was involved. There was a magazine called PC. I was in San
Francisco.
Kevin: PC magazine.
Betsy: PC Magazine, right. And, there was a guy named Tony Gold and there
was somebody else that I can't remember. There was Tony Gold and
this Mr. X started this magazine and they hired...David Banell will
probably tell you all, I don't know all the details but I'm sure he
has it engraved in his brain.
They hired David Banell to run it and I guess several other people,
and my understanding is, that they told them they were going to
give them a piece of the action, they weren't going to pay them
very much but you're all part owners and everything, but nobody
ever wrote it down.
So when Ziff Davis approached Tony Gold and Mr. X and wanted to buy
the magazine, and the guys said, "Oh yeah, sure," and they sold it
to him and all these people that were working for them said, "Well,
what about us. We're part owners too." But there was no proof of
it. So Ziff bought it, and they were right in the middle, just
about to go to press with an issue and they got word that it had
been purchased by Ziff.
So David Banell took just about the entire staff and they walked
out and went across town and started PC World. Apparently their
lawyers said, "Don't take anything with you." So they just walked
out and left the offices as they were, and Ziff, who now had a
magazine to get out and no one to do it, sent me out to San
Francisco for a couple of weeks and there was like an editorial
assistant and a couple of freelance writers, were the only people
left.
Kevin: So this is when you became the interim.
Betsy: This is how I become the editorial director of PC. So I basically
went out there and walked into this office and had to pull together
their issue and get it off to the printer. They had a big dummy on
the wall where everthing...
Kevin: They lay all the...
Betsy: They lay all the impositions where all the pages and the stories
were going to go and they moved everything around. [laughs] But
they couldn't resist.
Kevin: That is awesome.
David: Yeah.
Betsy: This one guy, whose name I wish I could remember. Barry Owen,
worked with me, and we were able to get it off to the printer and
then pack everything up and send it back to New York and then they
hired Barry Owen, he moved to New York and he eventually become the
editor, because that was who they had.
I was sort of the editorial director for a while and they said
that, "If you were going to do this, you would have to come to the
city. We are going to really set up an office here and make it
real." And I said, "No, I am not going to drive into the city every
day or take the train or the bus or anything." It was a interesting
story and we were getting much more interesting version of it from
David Barnell, who was there. [laughs]
And in the mean time, they were all starting up PC World and taking
all of their freelancers and trying to make it as difficult as
possible for PC. That was a big rivalry, obviously.
David: And then it created a couple of months of problems at creative too,
because my editor was gone. I had really gotten very dependent to
rely on her for so many things. "I got to edit this myself." And
then the whole question mark was, OK if PC magazine, is she can
stay with it. It was a time of uncertainty.
Betsy: I'm sure it was a bad career move.
Kevin: Yeah. But PC magazine still exist.
Betsy: Yeah, exactly. I don't know if I would have existed if I had to
commute to New York, that's a nasty commute. Millions of people do
it but, I just didn't want to be one of them. I didn't mean to
interrupt, so back to you.
Kevin: What are you most proud of, or everything you have done?
David: OK, that's obviously not a one word answer. Proud is, I am not
crazy about it. I guess the fact that I continued to hear from
people that said, "Hey, I got my start in computing from Basic
computer games or Creative Computing," or something that I had my
hand in, that makes me feel pretty good.
You have a long term, or longer term influence that just what you
do at the time, it's living on. It's not living on forever. Basic
isn't going to live on forever. But I think the idea that having
some positive influence on other people, on their lives, on their
careers, that's a good.
Kevin: You helped send people into the computer science field.
David: And you know the specific individual accomplishments. Yeah, I wrote
a couple of programs that are probably in some cases, maybe not the
program but the routines, are still in use. That's minor compared
to having an influence on people and their career and their
outlook, their future. That's way more important. "OK so I wrote a
great algorithm, so what."
Kevin: And you really think it's the same algorithm that's being used in
Google maps and...
David: Portions of it, yeah. But that is minor. I look back and I say,
"Almost anything that I wrote in the last 30-40 years, if I were
doing it today, I would have done it a little differently, but I
didn't know then what I know now." So there's no one thing I could
say, "Oh, that was a really great article, or great insight," or
something. Anything can be improved upon.
Kevin: Sure. That's what disappoints me about computer magazines today is
I don't think that it seems like children going to be able to go.
It's not going to motivate anybody to do anything, other than use
Word version 18 or whatever. There's no Basic programs to type
anymore and it's not exciting.
[cross talk]
David: Yeah. Well, [inaudible 01:42:31] was mentioning that at breakfast,
oh gosh that was just yesterday.
[laughter]
Betsy: It was yesterday [laughs] .
David: [laughs] That kids today don't have any feeling about, or I should
say knowledge about the real basics of bits. What is a bit?
Kevin: Right.
David: Nobody knows anymore. He wanted to find some little simple piece of
hardware. Really, I guess he has, that every kid when they're in
the 5th or 6th grade will be exposed to this so they'll have some
concept of what bits are all about. Are you ever going to get that
into schools today? No. So anyway, it's just kind of, hopefully
there's been some long term influence.
And what I'm doing now even, which is mainly developing bible
studies for...well, I mostly have guys that have had a drug or
alcohol addiction problem coming to this. They're in a rescue
mission. I'm hoping that these studies can have a little bit of an
influence on the direction of their lives. They're a positive
influence on where they go from here. So it's kind of, people more
than a specific thing or whatever.
[pause]
Those are terrible copies.
Kevin: They are copies. These are from the scans. I was printing scans and
I wasn't trying to make them pretty. Just for my reasons, it was
quick and dirty. I could've bumped the contrast and stuff.
David: There's Carl.
[pause]
Kevin: Do have anything left, like how many subscribers you had over time?
Is that data around anymore? How many newsstand copies you had? I
assume that is a lot.
David: OK, maximum, I think we mentioned that. We hit just about a half a
million before Ziff killed it. Then, they gave people a choice of
three magazines that they expected to continue to publish, PC,
Apple's A+, or Mac User.
I'm guessing that most people went with PC. One of the reasons
actually was Ziff's rationale at that point was, PC World had
really grown a lot and the circulation base of PC World and PC were
very close. They were both about a half million. PC might have had
a small lead.
Then, by killing Creative Computing and rolling all of those
subscribers, there was some overlap. Certainly, there were some
subscribers that got both magazines. You probably had a quarter of
a million additional subscribers into PC. All of the sudden, they
go to advertise, "We've got three-quarters of a million and PC
World only has half a million."
That was when PC had a huge growth spurt. You know, they started
publishing those telephone-book-thick issues.
Betsy: I would think that it probably still holds the record for the
largest magazine ever published, whenever the issue was that they
published it, it was their biggest one. Certainly magazines aren't
getting bigger now. They didn't continue to increase in size after
that.
David: Then they started publishing it twice a month. The nudge that the
subscriber base at Creative, gave to PC really, separated them
completely from PC World. They had their reasons.
Kevin: OK. This is a chart of the page count of Creative Computing over
its life. It's not a question, I just made a chart. Every December
there's a peak for the big December issue. Right at the end it
just, all of the sudden, stopped.
David: Well, that's when Ziff had decided to kill it, which was almost a
year before. They basically let us publish for another eight or
nine months after they had made the decision.
Betsy: There was a lot of back and forth. Are they going to kill it? Are
they not going to kill it?
David: They weren't promoting, no subscription promotion. They were saving
their money. If you don't promote the subscriptions, you're not
going to get them.
Betsy: This is page count.
David: It was advertising.
Kevin: [inaudible 01:48:59]
David: It wasn't actually subscriber base didn't drop them. That's cool.
Kevin: I just thought I'd do a comparison, even though that's not really
what I'm doing here. In the beginning, you guys were bimonthly and
they were monthly. I couldn't know how to do it accurately. Their
page count's actually higher, because they were doing twice as
much. I don't have all the data here. You guys tended to publish
larger issues than "Kilobyte?"
David: It was so dependent upon advertising. You got some magazines, they
would run 80, 90 percent advertising, if they could. In some
special interest fields, you can get away with that, because people
are actually buying the magazine for the advertising, not for the
editorial content.
Betsy: [inaudible 01:50:02] , a good example.
David: That's exactly right. Even what the guys that bought Military
Vehicles, they just went over so heavily to...I always believe that
you should have at least one-third editorial content, preferably
more. They dropped down to 20 percent to edit.
Kevin: There was one issue, the 10th anniversary issue, I don't mean to be
picking on Wayne here. There was this quote he happened to say,
which I thought was really interesting to me, I wanted to get your
take on it. He said, this is in 1984, "A computer system doesn't
really stand a prayer anymore unless there's at least one
dedicated, independent magazine for its users."
David: Wayne said that?
Kevin: Wayne said that. Is that true? At the time, would you have agreed
with that?
David: In '84? Again, you've got to look at where we were in the cycle at
that point. The cycle was then, there were more computers dying off
than there were new ones being released. Standardization had come
in really. You've got the IBM PC, and everybody's producing a PC
clone. Apple kept going, and Atari, and Commodore attempted to.
If you were to start a computer company at that point, with a new
computer, yeah, you'd need something to give your user base
something to do with it, more than just what the manufacturer was
selling. So, that's probably accurate. What do you think?
Betsy: Yeah, I think it's accurate. That's what people started to expect.
Kevin: Yeah. Another chord of the same issue which we've kind of touched
on from Tom Dwyer. This is in 1984. He's saying, "Computer
magazines used to have personality [laughter] and now they don't."
Now, they really don't.
Betsy: They really don't!
[laughter]
Kevin: I think they still have personality in form but now it's just
inconsistent.
David: Yeah. Right.
Betsy: Who was Tom Dwyer? I don't remember him.
David: Tom Dwyer? He was at University of Pittsburgh. He came up with all
those neat applications. He and Margo...He had the best basic
primer of anybody, in fact the only one that both Kemeny and Kurtz
endorsed outside of their own material. He had really written some
good Basic books.
Kevin: I'm just finishing up here. The Internet says you were born in
1939. Is that right?
David: Yes.
Kevin: Where were you born?
David: New York, New York.
Kevin: Excellent.
David: I was born in the hospital that my father had a hand in designing.
Kevin: Really?
David: He was an architect up until the Recession. I think he, perhaps,
designed the restrooms but he wasn't the...
[laughter]
Kevin: When were you two married?
Betsy: 1988. 25 years ago.
David: June 18, 1988.
Kevin: What's your last name now?
Betsy: Mine?
Kevin: Yes.
Betsy: Ahl.
Kevin: OK.
Betsy: I tried keeping this professional thing and it was just way too
confusing, since that really wasn't my name anyway. That was my
first husband's name, and then just...this is way too complicated.
Kevin: My wife kept her maiden name and now she wishes she hadn't. It's
just confusing. It just made sense to do.
Betsy: If had been my maiden name, I might have, but it really wasn't.
Kevin: What haven't I asked you that I should have?
David: [laughs] We kind of were noodling it around last night and said,
"Man, the guy's thorough."
Betsy: You the most prepared interviewer ever.
David: I jotted down a couple of notes. Nope.
Betsy: Got everything?
David: What's your thinking? Because originally you were talking to me
about covering Wayne's magazines and so on.
Kevin: My original thought, when I had put no thought into it, was that it
would be half about Wayne's magazine and half about Creative. First
of all, after talking to him, I thought there's not enough to do
that.
David: Did you talk to Wayne?
Kevin: I talked to Wayne.
David: Well that's good to know, right? Carl Helmers didn't know if Wayne
was still alive.
Kevin: He's still alive.
Betsy: That's true. We asked Carl Helmers if Wayne was still alive and he
was [inaudible 01:56:06] .
David: Actually, there was another guy up there that published a computer
magazine. What the heck was the name of it?
Betsy: Who are you talking about?
David: Up in New Hampshire, Peterborough. It was one of the earlier would-
be competitors to Datamation. So, it was much earlier.
He was absolutely totally convinced about the Kennedy assassination
and published a computer analysis of all the photos and everything
else. Every single issue of the magazine had this stuff. He and
Wayne were on the same wavelength on that. You ask Wayne about the
conspiracy. [laughs] You'll get an earful.
Kevin: In answer to your question. First, it was going to be the two, and
then that happened. Also my wife said, "If you're doing two, then
it's going to seem like a compare and contrast thing." That's not
what I want to do.
Now I'm thinking that this will be a project about the earliest
computer magazines, the first computer magazines. That way, I can,
whatever, four or five chapters. One on Creative, and maybe Byte.
I'm meeting with the editor of Byte in a couple of weeks at an
event, maybe Interface Age or one of the other ones.
David: If you can find Bob Jones, that would be an interesting contrast.
He was Interface Age. He had a different perspective on a lot of
things, and I had a lot of respect for him. He just didn't sell at
the right time. Too bad. Bob Jones was a very serious, good guy.
Kevin: Who were the other early people? Dr. Dobbs? I don't know what...
Betsy: Oh, Dr. Dobbs...
David: Jim Warren! Oh my goodness. That would give you another perspective
altogether.
Betsy: That's, again, the California...
David: Jim Warren and Bob Albrecht are tied together very closely. They're
both in sort of in the alternative lifestyle. I don't know what
you'd call it.
Betsy: That probably had Friday afternoon pot parties. [laughter]
David: Oh, boy. Did they ever! Yes, yes. Jim also was the one that started
the West Coast computer fairs. He's a very capable guy. Dr. Dobb's
journal was in a sense, well, you've probably seen it. You have,
right? OK, so you know.
That's really low level programming rather than higher languages.
We're talking about machine languages, assembly language,
programming, and there. It was sort of like Microsystems was to
Byte. Microsystems, for the really serious hardware guy. Dr. Dobbs
was for the really serious programmer, compared to Creative which
was for people who just wanted to type something in that would
work.
Kevin: [inaudible 01:59:35] basic right. Yeah.
Betsy: Dr. Dobbs. That was a totally different [inaudible 01:59:43]
competitor.
David: We didn't compete at all. I had a view that we competed at all with
them; they may have thought we did but I didn't think so.
Kevin: Did they even have advertising?
David: Oh yeah, actually they did, and it kept going for a long time
because it was a small little nitch magazine. But, yeah, Jim Warren
would be an interesting guy, very interesting guy early on. I don't
know about Albert because you say he published more tabloid
newspapers. I don't know if they ever really published any magazine
size thing or not. Probably not, but it would give me a totally
different perspective because they are coming from the west coast,
looser or whatever.
Kevin: That sounded pretty loose.
David: Yeah nothing compared to that.
Betsy: I think he was sort of in rebellion when he started working at
Creator Computing because he was coming off of AT&T where he had to
wear a suit to work every day. So the first thing he did was burn
his suits and wear t-shirt and jeans way before anybody was doing
that.
David: I went extremely in the other direction, yeah I did, but who else
real early. Personal computing which I think David Barnell somehow
involved in it at some point in there. Because they moved from the
west coast to New Jersey, they were bought by...who was that? It
was mostly a company that published things like hardware age and
advertiser-driven magazines. What was the name?
Betsy: I don't remember.
David: Oh, gosh. Begins with an 'H'.
Betsy: Halshep
David: No. Anyway, when they brought personal computing...I think Barnell
maybe even started it, and then they moved it to New Jersey, and
then David said "I'm not going to New Jersey. I'm a west coast
guy," or whatever. And then, they changed the whole thing totally.
That's why I said they're one of the ones where they were so
totally advertiser driven. A press release is a product review, as
far as they were concerned.
They had some interesting stuff. They were a competitor only in
name, but also because they got the advertising. "I think I'm going
to advertise." "Oh! We're going to publish a wonderful review! Give
it to us." And so they were early, and they made money. There were
a bunch of flash-in-the-pan magazines that lasted 2 or 3 or maybe 6
issues, but nobody...
Kevin: But only one in seven made it, so...
Betsy: One in seven, right?
David: That's right, exactly. I can't remember the name of some of these
ones, but there was a very successful big magazine that published
all Apple...reviews of Apple stuff. What was that one? Apple by
themselves spawned I'd guess half a dozen magazines.
Kevin: Inquest, and Insider, and Apple...a bunch of others there.
David: Right. Actually, there's one that I can't think of the name of, it
turned out, it was bigger and thicker and creative. They were
publishing a lot of stuff, but again, it would all be positive and
so they really killed us on getting advertising. We had been a
publisher of Apple material for a while. Then all these others came
along. That one, whatever it was, was really took a lot of
advertising from us. I'll think about it.
Kevin: You'll remember.
David: I'll remember some of this. When it all settled out, you came back
down to eight or nine, but the ones we're talking about...
Kevin: Well, at one point there was 200.
David: Yeah, I think that's correct.
Betsy: You are probably counting newsletters..
Kevin: Probably industry-specific stuff and niche stuff but still, you
went from one to 200, 10 years ago.
David: Yes. That's true.